Fabric Watch Monitoring in a DRM Environment - Application Notes

Fabric Watch Overview
Application Notes – Fabric Watch Monitoring in a DRM Environment 7
Element Categories
Fabric Watch elements are the hardware devices (hosts, routers, switches, and so on) of the fabric or
switch that are monitored. The Fabric Watch software categorizes similar elements it monitors into
classes, and each class has areas or behaviors that are observed.
Classes
The fabric and switch elements are organized into classes that are groupings of closely related
elements. The Fabric Watch classes are listed as follows:
• Fabric—Monitors key fabric resources, such as fabric reconfiguration, zoning changes, and new
fabric logins.
• Environment—Monitors switch environment functions, such as temperature, power supply, and
fan status.
• Port—Monitors port error and performance counters (includes E_Port, Optical F/FL_Port, Copper
F/FL_Port).
• SFP—Monitors operational values of select smart GBICs or small form factor pluggables.
• Performance Monitor—monitors Arbitrated Loop Physical Address (AL_PA) devices of loop
ports, cyclic redundancy check (CRC) errors of a predefined Source ID_Destination ID
(SID_DID) pair at a given port, and the filter counter for a given port. The Performance Monitor
class is new with Fabric Watch Version 3.0
Areas
Areas are the behaviors that the Fabric Watch software monitors. Different areas are subject to
different boundaries. For example, the Fan area is checked against minimum and maximum rpm levels,
while the Invalid CRC Count area of a port is checked against minimum and maximum CRC errors.
Table 1 lists the Fabric Watch classes, areas within the classes, and a description of each area. The
bolded abbreviations in parentheses identify Fabric Watch naming conventions for each class and area.
These abbreviations are important when identifying threshold names in error messages. Threshold
names consist of three items run together: the class abbreviation, the area abbreviation, and an index
number. For example, envTemp002 in a message would indicate the second temperature indicator on
a switch.
NOTE: Numbering for all Port and GBIC classes begins with index number 000 (as per the fabric
operating system port numbering convention), but Environment class index numbers begin with 001.
Therefore, the first element in a series of ports will be 000, but the first element in a series of
thermometers will be 001. For the Fabric class, the index number is always 000. The threshold name is
case sensitive.