Monitoring Traffic - HP A7533A - Brocade 4Gb SAN Switch Base Administrator's Manual

Monitoring traffic

To implement ISL Trunking effectively, you must monitor fabric traffic to identify congested paths or to
identify frequently dropped links. While monitoring changes in traffic patterns, you can adjust the fabric
design accordingly, such as by adding, removing, or reconfiguring ISLs and trunking groups in
problem areas.
There are three methods of monitoring fabric traffic:
• Advanced Performance Monitoring monitors traffic flow and allows you to view the impact of different
fabric configurations on performance. Refer to
(APM)" on page 327 for additional information.
• Fabric Watch allows you to monitor traffic flow through specified ports on the switch and send alerts
when the traffic exceeds or drops below configurable thresholds. Refer to the Fabric Watch
Administrator's Guide for additional information.
• Use the portPerfShow command as described in the following procedure to record traffic volume for
each port in your fabric over time.
To use the portPerfShow command
1. Connect to the switch and log in as admin.
2. Enter the following command:
portperfshow [interval]
where interval is the number of seconds between each data-gathering sample (the default is one
sample every second).
3. Record the traffic flow for each port participating in an ISL.
4. Repeat step 1
In a large fabric, it might be necessary to only identify and capture the key ISLs. However, you might
want to continue this process throughout the day (or an entire work cycle), to capture varying traffic
patterns under different conditions.
The following example shows a switch without trunking, and indicates that ports 0 through 2 are
underutilized and ports 4 and 5 are congested:
switch:admin> portperfshow
0 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
0 0
0 0
switch:admin>
The following example shows traffic flowing through a trunking group (ports 5, 6, and 7). After port 6
fails, traffic is redistributed over the remaining two links in the group, ports 5 and 7:
switch:admin> portperfshow
0 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
0 0
0 0
0 0
0 0
0 0
0 0
0 0
switch:admin>
362 Administering ISL Trunking
through step 3 for each switch in the fabric until all ISL traffic flow is captured.
2 3 4
0 145m 204m
0 145m 206m
2 3 4
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
0 0 0
"Administering Advanced Performance Monitoring
5 6 7
202m 0 168m
208m 0 186m
5 6 7
145m 144m 145m
144m 143m 144m
162m 0 162m
186m 0 186m
193m 0 192m
202m 0 202m
209m 0 209m
Total
719
745
Total
434
431
324
372
385
404
418