System energy consumption monitoring

monitoringpower-management

Do you know any apps that monitor system power consumption? Not just cpu, but all components, preferably?

UPDATE – powertop & powerstat

I found powertop, but it doesn't say much.

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I've also found this question: Power consumption monitoring problem and its duplicate on Ask Ubuntu: https://askubuntu.com/questions/291904/missed-power-est-column-in-powertop.

The answer is powertop needs a few hours to collect data before it provides calculations of power consumption. (Also grochmal advises this in his comments.) But this may not be the whole truth, in the light of what I found running powertop in the background.

$ sudo powertop &
[1] 20744
tomasz@tomasz-Latitude-E4200:~$ Loaded 0 prior measurements
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only 
RAPL device for cpu 0
RAPL device for cpu 0
RAPL device for cpu 0
Devfreq not enabled
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only

The Ask Ubuntu answer also mentions:

powerstat

It demands the laptop to run on battery (so not for RaspberryPi and desktops) and after 3 minutes gives this:

  Time    User  Nice   Sys  Idle    IO  Run Ctxt/s  IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit  Watts
03:28:26  20.2   0.0   2.4  77.4   0.1    1   1356    675    2    0    0  17.28 
03:28:36  12.8   0.0   2.4  84.8   0.1    1   1749    699    0    0    1  11.82 
03:28:46  11.6   0.0   1.7  86.7   0.0    1   1190    553    0    0    0  11.56 
03:28:56  16.8   0.0   2.4  80.7   0.1    1   1455    680    4    0    4  13.48 
03:29:06  14.7   0.0   1.9  83.4   0.1    2   1486    696    0    0    0  16.11 
03:29:16  22.6   0.0   3.1  74.3   0.0    3   2494    987    0    0    0  13.68 
03:29:26   4.3   0.0   0.8  94.9   0.1    2    806    391    0    0    1  12.05 
03:29:36   5.4   0.0   1.6  93.0   0.1    1   1219    665    4    0    2  11.85

Which is better. But a breakdown on components is missing. Or I don't know how to get them.

Best Answer

The only way to get an accurate reading of the whole computer's power consumption is to use an external power meter such as this one, for example.

Anything built-in will be flawed and ignore certain aspects like the energy loss inside the power supply and its fan, and possibly wrongly evaluate certain component consumption.

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