Your uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system is your data center’s first line of defense against power variations—spikes, dips and so on. Because thousands of dollars (or far more) of IT equipment is depending on a clean power supply, you can’t afford to wait for problems to arise in your UPS system before taking action: preventive maintenance is critical to uptime and to protecting sensitive electronics.

According to POWERTECH Industrial Corporation, some two-thirds of downtime events are preventable, with insufficient maintenance being one of the main causes. You may not be able to do much about malicious attacks, failures on the part of service providers and unforeseeable equipment failures, but you can take steps to ensure that many potential downtime events are thwarted. Preventive maintenance spans the entire range of systems in the data center, and each system has its own needs. In the case of the UPS system, here are several tips (in no particular order) to help ensure that power fluctuations don’t threaten your IT equipment.