Fabric Watch0 pages

SAN DATA SHEET

Brocade
FABRIC
WATCH

storage AREA
NETWORK
HIGHLIGHTS
• Increase availability and avoid costly
failures by monitoring numerous fabric
and switch elements
• Receive automatic event notifications
when switch and fabric elements
exceed thresholds
• Quickly identify and isolate faults
• Monitor and optimize fabric-wide
performance
• Easily integrate Fabric Watch with
enterprise systems management
solutions
• Enhance manageability by mitigating
the need for multiple, vendor-specific
monitoring tools

The Intelligent Fabric Health
Monitor for SANs
Brocade® Fabric Watch is an optional
Storage Area Network (SAN) health monitor
for Brocade switches. Fabric Watch enables
each switch to constantly watch its SAN
fabric for potential faults—and automatically
alert network managers to problems before
they become costly failures.
Fabric Watch tracks a variety of SAN fabric
elements, events, and counters. Monitoring
fabric-wide events, ports, transceivers,
and environmental parameters permits
early fault detection and isolation as well as
performance measurement. Unlike many
systems monitors, Fabric Watch is easy
to configure. Network administrators can
select custom fabric elements and alert
thresholds—or they can choose from a
selection of preconfigured settings.
In addition, it is easy to integrate Fabric
Watch with enterprise systems
management solutions.
By implementing Fabric Watch, storage
and network managers can rapidly
improve SAN availability and performance
without installing new software or system
administration tools.

Constant Monitoring for Large,
Heterogeneous SAN Fabrics
For a growing number of organizations,
SAN fabrics are a mission-critical part of
their systems architecture. These fabrics
can include hundreds of elements, such
as hosts, storage devices, switches, and
Inter-Switch Links (ISLs). A flexible solution
like Fabric Watch can optimize SAN value by
tracking a wide spectrum of fabric events,
such as:
• Fabric resources, including fabric
reconfigurations, zoning changes, and
new logins
• Switch environmental functions such as
temperature, power supply, and fan status,
along with security violations and highavailability metrics
• Port state transitions, errors, and traffic
information for multiple port classes as
well as operational values for supported
models of transceivers
• A wide range of performance information