I've been asked to estimate the power consumption of the servers I run for my laboratory. I thought that I'd ask if there was some handy Linux commandline to get the power consumption of the server... More on unix.stackexchange.com

PowerTop can be used to monitor power usage at the process level as described in How to monitor power usage in Linux , but it doesn't monitor total system power consumption (memory, drives, PSU, etc.), at least to my understanding. I use lm-sensors as described in How to install sensors (lm-sensors) on Ubuntu / Debian Linux for monitoring CPU core temperatures along with the Telegraf lm-sensors plugin for writing these to InfluxDB and displaying them in Grafana. Some have suggested this, but I don't see power consumption reported by lm-sensors on my servers, a mix of Supermicro X8 systems and Lenovo Tiny desktops. I have monitored power consumption using two methods: Initially, by running SNMP queries (in a Python script) to an APC AP7801 , networked, metered PDU. I bought this PDU (cheaply on eBay) with the expectation to monitor individual outlets, but I didn't dig deep enough before buying it and learned later that it reports only total power consumption for all outlets. Currently, I use the Telegraf apcupsd plugin on the host (Debian-based NAS) that monitors my APC BackUPS Pro 1500 through USB. This provides all information available in the apcaccess command, and also is written to InfluxDB and displayed in Grafana. Again, both of these methods monitor only total power consumption. There are two options for monitoring power consumption of individual systems: Use a networked, metered PDU that monitors power consumption by outlet rather than a total. These are available, for example the CyberPower PDU81004 Switched Metered-By-Outlet PDU, 100-240V/15A, 8 Outlets, 1U Rackmount , but can get pretty pricey. Use smart plugs that include power monitoring, like these TP-Link Kasa Matter Smart Plug w/ Energy Monitoring . More on reddit.com

Intel's PowerTOP might help. https://01.org/powertop/downloads https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/powertop You have to run it for a few hours before it shows data/power averages. More on reddit.com

I had that problem myself at some point, and here's what I found: You won't like it, but the only way I found is a file "energy_uj" from the "Intel RAPL" driver that tracks the sum of energy used in microjoules since boot. Here's an example: $ sudo cat /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/*/energy_uj 63264748624 To get the current power usage from that driver, you have to read the value twice and calculate using the time difference between your two reads. You then have the energy used for that particular stretch of time. This means you can't instantly get a power usage value. You need to track it over time in your program or you need to do a daemon that tracks it in the background that you can then ask for a "current" power usage value. Here's an example command line that you can try at the bash prompt to see what I'm talking about: sudo -v; old_energy_uj=0 old_time=0; while :; do energy_uj=$(sudo cat /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/*/energy_uj); time=$(date +%s%N); echo $(( (energy_uj - old_energy_uj) * 1000000 / (time - old_time) )); old_time=$time old_energy_uj=$energy_uj; sleep 1; done Here's that same command line with line-breaks added so you can better see what's happening there: sudo -v old_energy_uj=0 old_time=0 while :; do energy_uj=$(sudo cat /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/*/energy_uj) time=$(date +%s%N) echo $(( (energy_uj - old_energy_uj) * 1000000 / (time - old_time) )) old_time=$time old_energy_uj=$energy_uj sleep 1 done Here's what its output looks like here for me: $ sudo -v; old_energy_uj=0 old_time=0; while :; do energy_uj=$(sudo cat /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/*/energy_uj); time=$(date +%s%N); echo $(( (energy_uj - old_energy_uj) * 1000000 / (time - old_time) )); old_time=$time old_energy_uj=$energy_uj; sleep 1; done 0 26870 27503 28239 27934 27023 ^C The output numbers in this example are in milliwatts. The "27023" at the end before I hit Ctrl+C means that it used 27 Watt over the last second. This comment here was researched on a 6.9 kernel version and with an AMD Ryzen 5800X CPU. I think that RAPL energy value getting shown is somewhat new for Ryzen. It might not be there on older LTS kernels and maybe not with all AMD CPUs. More on reddit.com