Brocade Fabric Manager Administrator's Guide v6.1.0 (53-10000610-02, June 2008)

Fabric Manager Administrator’s Guide 131
53-10000610-02
Chapter
9
Change Management
In this chapter
•Overview of change management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
•Change management profiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
•Snapshots and change reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Overview of change management
The change management feature allows you to monitor changes in a fabric and generate
Extensible Markup Language (XML) reports listing the changes.
The change management feature is available to users with physical fabric access.
To use the change management feature, you must set up profiles defining which elements to
monitor, when to monitor them, and what to do when changes occur to those elements. The
notification configuration defines what to do when changes occur to the selected elements.
When you set up the profiles, you must select at least one element to monitor. You do not have to
define schedules or notification; however, if you do not define a schedule, there is no automated
checking, and if you do not define notifications, there are no alerts or e-mail notifications.
The profiles are saved on the server database. After a profile is defined and saved, any user on the
same server can view, edit, clone, or delete it. You can apply a single profile to multiple fabrics, and
one fabric can have multiple profiles for different monitoring purposes simultaneously.
To use the change management feature, follow these basic steps:
1. Configure notification parameters for all users on the server (see “Notification parameter
configuration” on page 106).
2. Create a change management profile defining which elements to monitor for changes (see
“Creating a change management profile” on page 135).
3. Optional: Compare subsequent snapshots to the baseline snapshot to monitor changes to the
elements over defined time frames (see “Comparing snapshots” on page 140).
4. Optional: Create multiple profiles to monitor different sets of elements. Snapshots are
associated with a single profile however, and a snapshot based on Profile X cannot be
compared to a snapshot based on Profile Y.