Question: How does the LANDesk Management Suite Power Management Saving report work to generate the savings numbers and how is the defaultusagetable.xml generated?
Answer:
LDMS 8.8:
The defaultusagetable.xml in LDMS 8.8 is standard and non editable through the console UI. Users can edit the file through Notepad.exe or another like editor but that is advanced work and a backup should be made before attempting this. The end result file must always be named defaultusagetable.xml or it will not be used by the report in LDMS 8.8. This file represents the usage of the computers in the group for the whole week.
The savings report refers to the base line (defaultusagetable.xml) of each machine, and the applied power policy for the calculated savings report.
By default, the xml file has no record for saturday and sunday in the file. That was by design. It is editable and other days can be copied to the Saturday and Sunday spots encorportating data for those days. If work hours must be expanded or Turn on and Turn off times must be changed for example, then the file is editable as well. Once again, when editing the defaultusagetable.xml, take a backup and make sure that the file to be used is named defaultusagetable.xml.
LDMS 9.0:
The defaultusagetable.xml is based upon computer data gathered by power management tools on the clients. An example would be something like this after removing the XML tags:
DayOfWeek name="Monday"
"Inactivity" at="0001" duration="6091"
DayOfWeek name="Tuesday"
DayOfWeek name="Wednesday"
DayOfWeek name="Thursday"
DayOfWeek name="Friday"
"Inactivity" at="0535" duration="1437"
Because the machines in this case were inactive for most of the week, the inactive timer was started on Monday at 001 (24 hours) and carried through for 6091 or all the way through Friday sometime and then became inactive again at 0535. There was no need for any other entries in the file because there was no further activity and the machine stayed inactive for the remainder of the time. There is a warning often that pops up stating there is no data for entire days of the week when attempting to create the defaultusagetable.xml. It means that the computer started idle at the beginning of the usage period and remained idle for a long period during the sample time. The data is accurate, there is just not a lot there. If a user wants to generate their own data driven xml, they must rename it to defaultusagetable.xml in order for it to be used in report calculation.
The defaultusagetable.xml in LDMS 9.0 is also editable by hand. Inactivity is determined by screen saver, mouse and keyboard movement and input responses received from the machine via power management tools at the workstation level.