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

Fabric Watch Administrator’s Guide 3

53-1000601-01

Introduction to fabric health

Fabric health refers to the capability of the fabric to support data being routed through it. A healthy

fabric enables effective data transmission between networked devices.

Although the concept of fabric health initially seems fairly simple, it can be a deep and complex

topic due to the number of factors that are involved. One of the more obvious criteria for fabric

health is the condition of the network hardware. A switch or port failure could easily prevent data

packets from reaching their destination. Network traffic can also influence fabric health.

If the number of packets routed through a port exceeds the port bandwidth, it causes network

delays and packet losses. Even environmental factors can become issues, as network hardware

can fail to function properly when stored in locations that do not meet the environmental conditions

for the device. For example, switches can fail when stored in rooms that are too hot.

Because of the varied and complex factors in determining fabric health, you need fabric monitoring

software such as Fabric Watch to help you to quickly detect, identify, and resolve fabric health

issues by continuously monitoring possible issues and reporting any potential concerns. Fabric

Watch automatically provides detailed reports on detected issues and helps you correct failures.

Fabric Watch provides customizable monitoring thresholds. You can configure Fabric Watch to

provide notification before problems arise, such as reporting when network traffic through a port is

approaching the bandwidth limit. This information enables you to perform preemptive network

maintenance such as trunking or zoning and avoid potential network failures.

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 internal 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.