Realizing we needed two sorts of alerts for our temperature monitoring

Haha, I was looking at a BAS front end with a customer and we were trying to figure out why an air handler kept tripping out. The return air duct static pressure sensor was reading 65536 kpa, so either the sensor was faulty or the building was moments away from being vaporized in a massive explosion. Replacing the sensor corrected the issue and hundreds of lives were saved ;)

I would offer that instead of monitoring the reactive egress of the devices purpose, thermal deltas, that one instead monitors the proactive ingress of what it needs to function to produce those thermal deltas, Alternating Current. If the devices native monitoring does not offer taps for voltage and amperage consumption then adding this before each device should be considered, certainly in data centers as some here have direct experience with HVAC failures and remaining on site for days to keep the uptime up. As a typical energy consuming device ages one can derive and relate many reactive events over time from proactive energy monitoring and in doing so one is certain to learn something new.