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

Fabric Watch Administrator’s Guide 11
53-1001188-01
Chapter
3
Fabric Watch components
In this chapter
•Fabric Watch classes, areas, and elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
•Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
•Areas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
•Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Fabric Watch classes, areas, and elements
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 and supplied power.
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.