Brocade Fabric Watch Administrator's Guide v6.1.0 (53-1000601-02, June 2008)

Fabric Watch Administrator’s Guide 1

53-1000601-02

DRAFT: BROCADE CONFIDENTIAL

Chapter

Fabric Watch Concepts

In this chapter

•Fabric Watch overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

•Introduction to fabric health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

•Fabric Watch components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

•Event Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

•Port persistence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

•Notification methods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

•Switch policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

•Audit messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Fabric Watch overview

Fabric Watch is an optional storage area network (SAN) health monitor software feature for

Brocade switches. It enables each switch to constantly monitor its SAN fabric for potential faults

and to automatically alert 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, 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, power supply, and fan status, along with

security violations.

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

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

• 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 to 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.