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

10 Fabric Watch Administrator’s Guide
53-1000601-01
Configuring events
1
Elements
Product Name defines an element as any fabric or switch component that the software monitors.
Within each area, the number of elements is equivalent to the number of components being
monitored. For instance, on a 64-port switch, each area of the Port class includes 64 elements.
Each element contains information pertaining to the description suggested by the area. To
continue the Ports example, each element in the Invalid word area of Ports would contain exactly
64 ports, each of which would contain the number of times invalid words had been received by the
port over the last time interval. Each of these elements maps to an index number, so that all
elements can be identified in terms of class, area, and index number. As an example, the
monitoring of the temperature sensor with an index of 1 can be viewed by accessing the first
temperature sensor within the temperature area of the environment class.
Subclasses are a minor exception to the preceding mapping rule. Subclasses, such as E_Ports,
contain areas with elements equivalent to the number of valid entries. Within the same example
used thus far in this section, in a 64-port switch in which eight ports are connected to another
switch, each area within the E_Port class would contain eight elements.
Each area of a subclass with defined thresholds will act in addition to the settings applied to the
element through the parent class. Assignment of elements to subclasses does not need to be
performed by a network administrator. These assignments are seamlessly made through
automated detection algorithms.
Configuring events
The following area attributes are used to define and detect events in Fabric Watch:
• “Event behavior types,” next
• “Data values” on page 11
• “Threshold values” on page 12
• “Time bases” on page 13
• “Event settings” on page 15
You can customize the information reported by Fabric Watch by configuring event behavior types,
threshold values, time bases, and event settings. You cannot change data values; these represent
switch behavior that is updated by the software.
Event behavior types
Based on the number of notifications delivered for events there are two categories of event
behavior types:
• “Continuous event behavior,”
• “Triggered event behavior”