Release Notes

Fabric OS v7.2.0a Release Notes v1.0 Page 7 of 93
minute, send an e-mail notification when the error rate is at five per minute, and fence a port when the
error rate exceeds ten per minute.
 Ability to monitor both sudden failures and gradual degradations
MAPS provides the ability to not only detect abnormal conditions but also gradually deteriorating
conditions in the switch. For example, if a CRC error counter at a switch port increments suddenly at
the rate of five per minute, MAPS can detect and alert the end users about that condition. Similarly, if
the CRC error counter is gradually incrementing at the rate of five per day, even that condition can be
detected and reported by MAPS as well, with a different action taken for each condition.
 Support for multiple monitoring categories
MAPS supports various monitoring categories such as: Switch status, Port health, FRU (Field
Replaceable Unit) health, Security violations, Fabric state changes, Switch resource, Traffic
performance and FCIP health.
This essentially enables monitoring of the overall switch status, switch ports, SFPs, port blades, core
blades, switch power supplies, fans, temperature sensors, security policy violations such as login
failures, fabric reconfigurations, CPU and memory utilization of the switch, traffic performance at port,
FCIP circuits health, etc.
 Support for multiple alerting mechanisms and actions
MAPS provides various mechanisms to deliver alerts to the end users via RASlogs, SNMP traps and e-
mail notifications when the monitoring thresholds are exceeded. MAPS also allows users to perform
port fencing action when errors on a given port exceed a certain threshold. MAPS alerting
mechanisms/actions are associated with each monitoring rule. However, users are also given the
flexibility to enable or disable these alerting mechanisms/actions for the entire switch. This for
example, helps users to suppress all alerts during a maintenance window, or when testing and
“tuning” new rules within a policy.
 CLI Dashboard
MAPS provides a CLI based dashboard of health and error statistics to provide an at a glance view of
the switch status and various conditions that are contributing to the switch status. This enables users
to get instant visibility into any hot spots at a switch level and take corrective actions.
The summary section of the dashboard provides the overall status of the switch health and the status
of each monitoring category. If there is any category deemed to be out of “normal” status due to
violations of rules, the dashboard shows the rules that were triggered for that category.
The dashboard also provides historical information of the switch status for up to seven days. It
provides raw counter information of various error counters such as CRC, Class 3 Transmit Timeout
Discard, Link Resets, etc. without requiring users to set any monitoring policy. This historical counter
information can also be used to assist the user in fine-tuning their MAPS rules by showing where a
particular threshold may be just missing catching a particular behavior on the switch.
Note: Brocade Network Advisor 12.1 or later provides a feature rich dashboard that provides fabric-
wide visibility of hot spots, deeper historical information and much more. Please refer to Brocade
Network Advisor 12.1 documentation for additional details.