Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switch Fabric Manager Software Configuration Guide, NX-OS 4.0 (OL-16598-01, June 2008)

CHAPTER
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28-1
Nexus 5000 Series Switch Fabric Manager Software Configuration Guide
OL-16598-01
28
Network Monitoring
The primary purpose of Fabric Manager is to manage the network. In particular, SAN discovery and
network monitoring are two of its key network management capabilities.
This chapter contains the following sections:
• Information About SAN Discovery and Topology Mapping, page 28-1
• Health and Event Monitoring, page 28-4
Information About SAN Discovery and Topology Mapping
Fabric Manager provides extensive SAN discovery, topology mapping, and information viewing
capabilities. Fabric Manager collects information on the fabric topology through SNMP queries to the
switches connected to it. Fabric Manager recreates a fabric topology, presents it in a customizable map,
and provides inventory and configuration information in multiple viewing options.
This section includes the following topics:
• Device Discovery, page 28-1
• Topology Mapping, page 28-2
• Inventory Management, page 28-3
• Viewing Logs from Device Manager, page 28-4
Device Discovery
Once Fabric Manager is invoked, a SAN discovery process begins. Using information polled from a seed
switch, including Name Server registrations, Fibre Channel Generic Services (FC-GS), Fabric Shortest
Path First (FSPF), and SCSI-3, Fabric Manager automatically discovers all devices and interconnects on
one or more fabrics. All available switches, host bus adapters (HBAs), and storage devices are
discovered. Cisco SAN switches use Fabric-Device Management Interface (FMDI) to retrieve HBA
model, serial number and firmware version, and host operating-system type and version discovery
without host agents. Fabric Manager obtains this information through SNMP queries to each switch. The
device information discovered includes device names, software revision levels, vendor, ISLs, SAN port
channels, and VSANs.