Deployment Guide

Flow Monitor

● Overview of Flow Monitor ...............................................................................................33

● Creating Flow Monitor flows............................................................................................34

● Activating Flow Monitor flows..........................................................................................36

● Deactivating Flow Monitor flows......................................................................................36

● Viewing Flow Monitor flows.............................................................................................37

● Learning in Flow Monitor flows........................................................................................37

● Configuring Flow Monitor for a trunk group.....................................................................39

● Monitoring Fibre Channel routed fabrics......................................................................... 40

● XISL and Backbone E_Port monitoring...........................................................................50

● Flow Monitor examples .................................................................................................. 52

● Flow Monitor and High Availability.................................................................................. 57

● Flow monitors and MAPS................................................................................................57

● Flow monitors on Access Gateways............................................................................... 57

● Flow Monitor limitations...................................................................................................57

Overview of Flow Monitor

Flow Monitor enables you to monitor all the traffic passing through E_Ports, EX_Ports, F_Ports, and

XISL_Ports using any hardware-supported flow parameters. It also lets you define your own monitoring

flows using combinations of ingress and egress ports, source and destination devices, logical unit

numbers (LUNs), and frame types to create a flow definition for a specific use case.

Flow Monitor provides support for monitoring the following flows and traffic:

• Learning and static flows for traffic passing through E_Ports and F_Ports

• Learning and static flows monitoring edge-to-edge traffic, edge-to-backbone traffic, and backbone-to-

edge traffic passing through EX_Ports

• Learning and static flows monitoring traffic inside logical fabrics and inter-fabric (routed) traffic

passing through XISL_Ports

• Learning and static flows monitoring inter-fabric traffic and backbone traffic passing through

backbone E_Ports

In Fabric OS 7.1.x and earlier, the Advanced Performance Monitor (APM) provided the following

monitors: End-to-End, Frame-based, ISL, and Top Talker. In Fabric OS 7.3.0, Flow Monitor provides

you with the following abilities in addition to those provided by the APM monitors:

• Monitoring of application flows (for example, a flow within a fabric from a Host to a Target/LUN) at a

given port.

• Comprehensive visibility into application flows in a fabric, including the ability to learn (discover) flows

automatically.

• When N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) is used on the host, you can monitor VM (Virtual Machine)-to-

LUN level performance.

• Capturing statistics for specified flows, which provides insights into application performance. These

statistics include transmitted and received frame counts, transmitted and received frame throughput

rates, SCSI Read and SCSI Write frame counts, the number of SCSI Reads and Writes per second

(IOPS), as well as others.

Flow Vision Administrators Guide

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