Brocade Fabric OS v7.2.0d Release Notes v1.0

Fabric OS v7.2.0d Release Notes v1.0 Page 6 of 52
New Feature Descriptions
MAPS (Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite)
FOS v7.2 implements a new easy to use policy based monitoring and alerting suite that proactively monitors
the health and performance of the SAN infrastructure to ensure application uptime and availability. Brocade
MAPS helps users to uncover potential problems in the SAN fabric quickly, before they cause application
performance impacts or costly failures.
MAPS is a key component of Brocade’s Fabric Vision technology that is aimed at dramatically reducing the
operational complexity in managing the SAN infrastructure and ensuring application uptime and availability.
Note: Usage of MAPS features requires the Fabric Vision license or both the Fabric Watch and Advanced
Performance Monitoring (APM) licenses.
MAPS offers the following capabilities:
 Policy Based Monitoring
The policy based monitoring feature of MAPS offers the following capabilities:
 Pre-defined monitoring groups and pre-defined monitoring policies with customization
capability
MAPS enables easier monitoring of the switch by providing pre-defined monitoring groups and pre-
validated monitoring policies that users can readily enable, while still providing the flexibility to the end
users to create their own custom monitoring groups and custom monitoring policies.
A MAPS monitoring policy is a collection of monitoring rules and actions associated with each rule.
Users can define multiple monitoring policies but can activate only one monitoring policy at a time on
the switch. This, for example, allows users to use a certain monitoring policy in production and a
different monitoring policy during maintenance.
MAPS provides pre-defined monitoring groups for monitoring switch ports attached to servers, switch
ports attached to storage, E_ports, short wavelength SFPs, long wave length SFPs, etc. MAPS also
provides pre-defined monitoring policies such as aggressive, moderate and conservative policies,
based on different monitoring thresholds and actions. Users can choose one of these pre-defined
policies, modify select rules within any of the pre-defined policies, or create their own custom groups
and custom policies for monitoring the switch.
MAPS customization capability allows users to create custom monitoring groups, such as a group of
switch ports that are attached to high priority applications, medium priority applications, low priority
applications, etc. and monitor these groups using their own unique rules. For example, users may
choose to “port-fence” a problematic port connected to a low priority application, while choosing only
to notify via RASlog if that port is connected to a high priority application.
With Brocade Network Advisor 12.1 or later, users can apply a given monitoring policy across multiple
switches and multiple fabrics instantly, ensuring consistent monitoring across an entire environment.
 Flexible monitoring rules
MAPS provides flexible monitoring rules to monitor a given counter for different threshold values and
take different actions when each threshold value is crossed. For example, users can monitor a CRC
error counter at a switch port and can generate a RASlog when the error rate is more than two per