Workaround using macros in calculation formulas

[Manuel Deschambault]

I have a situation that I am trying to address via a template. I created a template for PDUs, and that works splendidly.

Howerver, each rack in our equipment room has two electric circuits and two PDUs (one on each side). The purpose here is to connect each of the two power supplies of our servers to different PDUs in the rack so it survives a down electrical circuit.

This means that a single PDU needs to be able to handle to power load by itself it the paired PDUs electric circuit fails.

I'm trying to create a "rack" template with the following macros:

• PDU1Name
• PDU2Name

And I would like to have many calculated items that use those macros in their formulas, for example:

Item: Total_AMPs
Type: Calculated
Formula:

last(/{$PDU1Name}/AMP_PHASE1)+last(/{$PDU1Name}/AMP_PHASE2)+last(/{$PDU1Name}/AMP_PHASE3)+last(/{$PDU2Name}/AMP_PHASE1)+last(/{$PDU2Name}/AMP_PHASE2)+last(/{$PDU2Name}/AMP_PHASE3)

Now I have read that macros are not expanded in a calculated item's formula field, but since this is a pretty basic data center monitoring task, I am hoping somebody came up with a workaround and could walk me through it.

The goal would be to create a new rack, assign the template, set the two macros to the proper values, and for every data point to populate with the correct calculated data