HP StorageWorks Fabric OS 5.0.0 Fabric Watch User Guide (AA-RW1TA-TE, May 2005)

21Fabric OS 5.0.0 Fabric Watch user guide
2 Fabric Watch concepts
This chapter contains the following sections:
• Fabric watch components, page 21
• Configuring events, page 31
• Port persistence, page 39
• Notification methods, page 39
• Switch policies, page 42
• Interpreting event messages, page 42
Fabric watch components
Fabric Watch uses a hierarchical organization to track the network device information it
monitors. There is a class, area, and element associated with every monitored behavior.
Classes are the highest level in the system, subdivided into one or more areas. Areas contain
one or more elements.
The following sections explain this hierarchy and its application within Fabric Watch.
Classes
Classes are high-level categories of elements. Classes are intentionally wide groupings of
similar fabric devices or fabric data.
Examples of classes include Port (which includes all physical ports on a switch), Security
(which includes information related to unauthorized login attempts), and Environment (which
contains information related to the room temperature, supplied power and fan assemblies).
In some cases, classes are divided into subclasses. This additional level in the hierarchy
increases the flexibility of setting monitoring thresholds. You can use subclasses to add
additional event monitoring to fabric objects that meet the requirements of a subclass.
For example, ports connected to another switch can be monitored using both the Port class
and E_Port subclass. You can configure general port monitoring using the Port class and
monitoring specific to a type of port using the E_Port class. Ports connected to another switch
can trigger events based on either of these configurations. Ports that are not connected to
another switch are not affected by the additional monitoring configured into the E_Port class.