Looking for opinions.
Most of my experience comes from being a developer who enjoys drinking beer with operations people cos I get to hear all the gnarly stories :D
From what I understand, UPSs tend to fall into one of two categories; small consumer desk mount boxes that are enough to keep a single modest workstation going for ~an hour, and larger enterprise grade rack mount systems.
- The consumer grade ones tend not to have network management built in, but through something like NUT you can check the status and get alerts about power/battery health etc
- The enterprise grade ones typically have network management, usually in the form of a control module that exposes a web interface and SNMP for monitoring - they are typically not very secure, and usually rely on being on a separate management network that requires VPN access or something
I am by no means an expert, but it sounds like you are planning on deploying machines at remote sites, and want to include a UPS as part of that package - I’d assume that you already have some infrastructure in place for monitoring these machines remotely, so I’d suggest leveraging that to monitor a UPS connected over USB as well