Fabric Watch Overview - Brocade Communications Systems 1606 Administrator's Manual

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Fabric Watch overview

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, GBICs (Gigabit Interface Converters), 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:
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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.
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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:
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Environment class
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SFP class
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Port class
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Fabric class
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E_Port class
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F_Port class
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AL_PA Performance Monitor class (this class is displayed using the fwConfigure command;
however, it is not supported).
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EE Performance Monitor class
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Filter Performance Monitor class
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Security class
Performance information for AL_PA and end-to-end metrics.
Fabric Watch Administrator's Guide
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