Technical data

DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF
Operational Simplicity: Automating and Simplifying SAN Provisioning 8 of 15
fig05_Operational_Simplicity_v2
LUN1
LUN2
Source Device
Destination
Device
Flow Direction
Figure 5. Uni-directional ow from a single host to multiple LUNs.
Threshold-BasedMonitoringandAlerting
As SAN infrastructures continue to grow in size and complexity, proactive monitoring of the health and
performance of the SAN becomes critical. However, dening and setting up appropriate threshold-based rules
and policies for proactive monitoring can be a complex, time consuming task that requires expertise.
The Brocade Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite, or MAPS, is an easy-to-use policy-based threshold monitoring
and alerting suite that proactively monitors the health and performance of the SAN infrastructure to ensure
application uptime and availability. What makes it “easy-to-use”? MAPS takes the complexity, guess work, and
manual effort out of dening and conguring appropriate rules and thresholds that enables proactive monitoring.
Offering pre-built groups, policies, and actions—all based on Brocade’s more than 15 years’ experience and
expertise—MAPS makes threshold conguration, monitoring and alerting simple. Using Brocade Network
Advisor, organizations can congure the entire fabric (or multiple fabrics) at one time using common rules and
policies, or customize policies for specic ports or switch elements—all through a single dialog.
MAPS also provides an integrated dashboard that displays all critical information, including overall switch health,
error statistics for every aspect of the switch, along with details on out-of-policy conditions. This dashboard
helps administrators quickly pinpoint potential issues and easily identify trends and other behaviors occurring
on a switch or fabric.
Other Brocade tools, such as Flow Monitor and Bottleneck Detection, are integrated into MAPS. As a
result, MAPS can monitor ows that are established within Flow Monitor and generate alerts based on user
dened rules. Similarly, Bottleneck Detection information is integrated with the MAPS dashboard, enabling
administrators to get an instant view of the bottlenecked ports in the switch, enabling rapid problem resolution.
How Does MAPS Work?
Based on Brocade’s more than 15 years’ experience and best practice expertise, Brocade has pre-validated
hundreds of threshold-based rules with appropriate pre-dened actions, and packaged these rules into pre-
dened monitoring policies: aggressive, conservative, and moderate. The Aggressive Policy contains rules with
very strict thresholds, and is for environments that need a pristine network. The Conservative Policy contains
rules with more lenient thresholds and is for environments that are resilient and can tolerate some errors; the
default monitoring policy. The Moderate Policy contains rules with threshold values between the aggressive and
conservative policies. If these three pre-dened policies aren’t quite right for your environment, MAPS allows you
to copy a policy and modify any rules to t your specic environment, accelerating the conguration process.
MAPS provides pre-dened monitoring groups to further streamline the conguration process. Pre-dened
monitoring groups include: all host ports; all target ports; all E_Ports; all SFPs; all power supplies; all fans; CPU
utilization, and more. Ports are automatically assigned to the right group, dramatically reducing manual effort
and errors. Users also have the exibility to create custom monitoring groups—such as switch ports attached