Brocade Fabric Watch Administrator's Guide v6.2.0 (53-1001188-01, April 2009)

2 Fabric Watch Administrator’s Guide

53-1001188-01

Fabric Watch overview

Fabric Watch is an optional storage area network (SAN) health monitor that allows you to enable

each switch to constantly monitor its SAN fabric for potential faults and automatically alerts you to

problems long before they become costly failures.

Fabric Watch tracks a variety of SAN fabric elements, events, and counters. Monitoring fabric-wide

events, ports, (Gigabit Interface Converter) GBICs, and environmental parameters enables early

fault detection and isolation as well as performance measurement. You can select custom fabric

elements and alert thresholds or choose from a selection of preconfigured settings. You can also

easily integrate Fabric Watch with enterprise system management solutions.

By implementing Fabric Watch, you can rapidly improve SAN availability and performance without

installing new software or system administration tools.

For a growing number of organizations, SAN fabrics are a mission-critical part of their system

architecture. These fabrics can include hundreds of elements, such as hosts, storage devices,

switches, and interswitch links (ISLs). An instrumentation solution for SANs delivers optimal value

by tracking a wide spectrum of fabric events. For instance, Fabric Watch monitors:

• Fabric resources, including fabric reconfigurations, zoning changes, and new logins.

• Switch environmental functions, such as temperature and power supply status, along with

security violations.

• Port state transitions, errors, and traffic information for the following port classes as well as

operational values for supported models of “smart” GBICs/SFPs:

• Environment class

• SFP class

• Port class

• Fabric class

• E_Port class

• F_Port class

• AL_PA Performance Monitor class

• EE Performance Monitor class

• Filter Performance Monitor class

• Security class

• Performance information for AL_PA and end-to-end metrics.

Fabric Watch lets you define how often to measure each switch and fabric element and specify

notification thresholds. Whenever fabric elements exceed these thresholds, Fabric Watch

automatically provides notification using several methods, including e-mail messages, SNMP traps,

and log entries.