Tag Archives: FabricWatch

1.1 – MAPS – Know what’s going on.

I’ve written about Fabric Watch quite a lot and I have always stressed the usefulness of this licensed add-on as a feature in FOS. This post will outline the major characteristics of MAPS and why you should migrate now. As of FOS 7.2 there has been a transition from Fabric Watch to MAPS (Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite) and over the past few FOS versions it has seen a huge improvement in overall RAS (Redundancy, Availability and Serviceability) monitoring features. As of FOS 7.4 FabricWatch is no longer incorporated in FOS and as such MAPS is the only option you have if you want to use it.  MAPS is one section of a two part suite called Fabric Vision together with its performance companion “Flow-vision”. The MAPS part can interact with flow-vision based on criteria you specify and monitor/alert on performance related events.

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FabricWatch FW-1050 alerts on SFP power failures

Whenever you see Fabricwatch throw a lot of a lot of FW-1050 warning messages around indicating an out of boundary power value on SFP’s it is most likely these ports have never been polled by the CP’s.

2014/10/08-04:04:27, [FW-1050], 94159, SLOT 5 | FID 128, WARNING, xxxxxx, Sfp Supply Voltage for port 7/13, is below low boundary(High=3630, Low=2970). Current value is 0 mV.
2014/10/08-04:04:27, [FW-1050], 94160, SLOT 5 | FID 128, WARNING, xxxxxx, Sfp Supply Voltage for port 7/15, is below low boundary(High=3630, Low=2970). Current value is 0 mV.
2014/10/08-04:04:27, [FW-1050], 94161, SLOT 5 | FID 128, WARNING, xxxxxx, Sfp Supply Voltage for port 7/20, is below low boundary(High=3630, Low=2970). Current value is 0 mV.
2014/10/08-04:04:27, [FW-1050], 94162, SLOT 5 | FID 128, WARNING, xxxxxx, Sfp Supply Voltage for port 7/22, is below low boundary(High=3630, Low=2970). Current value is 0 mV.
2014/10/08-04:04:27, [FW-1050], 94163, SLOT 5 | FID 128, WARNING, xxxxxx, Sfp Supply Voltage for port 7/28, is below low boundary(High=3630, Low=2970). Current value is 0 mV.
2014/10/08-04:04:27, [FW-1050], 94164, SLOT 5 | FID 128, WARNING, xxxxxx, Sfp Supply Voltage for port 7/30, is below low boundary(High=3630, Low=2970). Current value is 0 mV.

Multi_mode_sfp_transceiver_IMGP7822_wp

On a normally operational port FOS will poll the SFP’s so now and then to check on various things. This includes the usual SFP inventory like serial number, Vendor ID, SFP capabilities etc. Additional things that checked are the TX and RX power levels, voltage and current being used on that particular SFP.

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Brocade Fabric Vision – Version 1

As you may have read in my previous posts I’m not really a fan of marketing driven terminology whereby existing technology is re-branded over and over again in order to obfuscate the underlying technology and make things more complex that they really are. The FC Gen-X nonsense is one of them. With Brocade Fabric Vision it took me a while however I see where Brocade is going with this and more where it is coming from.

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