The power consumption of a computing device is inferred from the utilization rates of individual components of the computing device and a utilization-to-power-consumption transfer function that was derived by benchmarking that, or an analogous, computing device. The inferred power consumption of a computing device is aggregated to infer the power consumption of various groups and super-groups of computing devices. The historical power consumption of computing devices is inferred based on the utilization rates of individual components of the computing devices at relevant times in the past. Historical power consumption is used to derive a power consumption profile of a computing device and the inferred current power consumption of such a computing device is compared to such a power consumption profile, and to the historical power consumption, to identify deviations therefrom, which can provide proactive detection of potential hardware faults, software glitches, or other errors.