Brocade Fabric Watch Administrators Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) - Manual (Page 13)

Fabric Watch
● Fabric health................................................................................................................... 13
● Fabric Watch overview....................................................................................................13
● Role-based access control..............................................................................................14
● Fabric Watch licensing.................................................................................................... 14
● Reasons to customize Fabric Watch settings................................................................. 14
● Class, area, and element hierarchy................................................................................ 16
● Switch monitoring components....................................................................................... 16
● Logical switch support.....................................................................................................19
● Threshold monitoring using SNMP tables.......................................................................19
● Fabric Watch event settings............................................................................................20
● Fabric Watch notification types....................................................................................... 20
● Fabric Watch audit messages.........................................................................................21
● Data values..................................................................................................................... 22
● Fabric Watch support in Access Gateway mode............................................................ 22
Fabric health
Fabric health refers to the capability of the fabric to route data. A healthy fabric enables effective data
transmission between networked devices.
One of the more obvious criteria for fabric health is the condition of the network hardware. A switch or
port failure can prevent data packets from reaching their destination. Network traffic can also influence
fabric health.
If the number of packets routed through a port exceeds the port bandwidth, it causes network delays
and packet loss. Receive (Rx) and Transmit (Tx) performance areas are used to monitor the bandwidth
utilization to help keep traffic flowing to avoid congestion.
Because of the varied factors involved in determining fabric health, Fabric Watch can help you to detect,
identify, and resolve fabric health issues by continuously monitoring possible issues and reporting any
potential concerns. Fabric Watch automatically provides detailed reports on detected issues and helps
you correct failures.
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 and events. Monitoring fabric-wide events, ports,
and environmental parameters enables early fault detection and isolation as well as performance
measurement. You can configure fabric elements and alert thresholds on an individual-port basis and
you can also easily integrate Fabric Watch with enterprise system management solutions.
Fabric Watch Administrators Guide 13
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