Brocade Fabric Watch Administrator's Guide Supporting Fabric OS v6.0.0 (53-1000601-01, October 2007)

Fabric Watch Administrator’s Guide 1
53-1000601-01
Chapter
1
Fabric Watch Concepts
In this chapter
•Fabric Watch overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
•Introduction to fabric health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
•Fabric Watch components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
•Configuring events. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
•Port persistence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
•Notification methods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
•Switch policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
•Interpreting event messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Fabric Watch overview
Fabric Watch is an optional storage area network (SAN) health monitor software feature for
Brocade switches running Fabric OS v2.2 or higher. It enables each switch to constantly monitor its
SAN fabric for potential faults and to automatically alert you to problems long before they become
costly failures.
Fabric Watch tracks a variety of SAN fabric elements, events, and counters. Monitoring fabric-wide
events, ports, GBICs, and environmental parameters enables early fault detection and isolation as
well as performance measurement. You can select custom fabric elements and alert thresholds or
choose from a selection of preconfigured settings. You can also easily integrate Fabric Watch with
enterprise systems management solutions.
By implementing Fabric Watch, you can rapidly improve SAN availability and performance without
installing new software or system administration tools.
For a growing number of organizations, SAN fabrics are a mission-critical part of their systems
architecture. These fabrics can include hundreds of elements, such as hosts, storage devices,
switches, and interswitch links (ISLs). An instrumentation solution for SANs delivers optimal value
by tracking a wide spectrum of fabric events. For instance, Fabric Watch monitors:
• Fabric resources, including fabric reconfigurations, zoning changes, and new logins.
• Switch environmental functions such as temperature, power supply, and fan status, along with
security violations.
• Port state transitions, errors, and traffic information for multiple port classes as well as
operational values for supported models of “smart” GBICs/SFPs.
• Performance information for AL_PA, and end-to-end metrics.