Identifying Top Bandwidth Users (Top Talkers) - HP A7533A - Brocade 4Gb SAN Switch Base Administrator's Manual

Identifying top bandwidth users (Top Talkers)

Top Talker monitors determine the flows (SID/DID pairs) that are the major users of bandwidth (after initial
stabilization). Top Talker monitors measure bandwidth usage data in real-time and relative to the port on
which the monitor is installed.
NOTE: Initial stabilization is the time taken by a flow to reach the maximum bandwidth. This time varies
depending on the number of flows in the fabric and other factors. The incubation period can be up to 14
seconds in the DC Director and up to 82 seconds in the SAN Switch 4/32, 4/64 SAN Switch, SAN Switch
4/32B, 400 Multi-protocol Router, and 4/256 SAN Director.
Top Talker can be installed only on switches that run Fabric OS 6.0.0 or later. Top Talker monitors are not
supported on the 4/8 SAN Switch, 4/16 SAN Switch.
Applications can use the Top Talker data to do the following:
• Re-route the traffic through different ports that are less busy, so as not to overload a given port.
• Alert you of the top-talking flows on a port if the total traffic on the port exceeds the acceptable
bandwidth consumption.
You can use Top Talkers to identify the SID/DID pairs that consume the most bandwidth and can then
configure them with certain Quality of Service (QoS) attributes so they get proper priority. See
fabric behavior" on page 331 for information on QoS.
The Top Talker monitor is based on SID/DID and not WWNs. Once Top Talker is installed on a port, it
remains installed across power cycles.
Top Talker supports two modes: port mode and fabric mode.
• Port mode Top Talker
A Top Talker monitor can be installed on an F_Port to measure the traffic originating from the F_Port
and flowing to different destinations.
• Fabric mode Top Talker
In fabric mode, Top Talker monitors are installed on all E_Ports in the fabric and measure the data rate
of all the possible flows in the fabric (ingress E_Port traffic only). In fabric mode, Top Talker monitors
can determine the top n bandwidth users on a given switch.
You can install Top Talker monitors either in port mode or fabric mode, but not both.
How do Top Talker monitors differ from end-to-end monitors? End-to-end monitors provide
counter statistics for traffic flowing between a given SID-DID pair. Top Talker monitors identify all possible
SID-DID flow combinations that are possible on a given port and provides a sorted output of the top talking
flows. Also, if the number of flows exceeds the hardware resources, existing end-to-end monitors fail to get
real time data for all of them; however, Top Talker monitors can monitor all flows for a given port (E_Port or
F_Port).
Admin Domain considerations: Top Talker monitors are always installed in AD255.
NPIV considerations: Top Talker takes NPIV devices into consideration when calculating the top
talking flows.
352 Administering Advanced Performance Monitoring
"Optimizing