Brocade Fabric Watch Administrators Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) - Manual (Page 14)

Fabric Watch provides customizable monitoring thresholds. You can configure Fabric Watch to provide
notification before problems arise, such as reporting when network traffic through a port is
approaching the bandwidth limit. This information enables you to perform pre-emptive network
maintenance, such as trunking or zoning, and avoid potential network failures.
Fabric Watch lets you define how often to measure each switch and fabric element and specify
notification thresholds. Whenever fabric elements exceed these thresholds, Fabric Watch
automatically provides notification using several methods, including e-mail messages, SNMP traps,
and log entries.
Role-based access control
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) defines the capabilities that a user account has based on the role
the account has been assigned. For each role, there is a set of predefined permissions on the jobs
and tasks that can be performed on a fabric and its associated fabric elements. Fabric OS v6.1.0 and
later use RBAC to determine which commands a user can issue.
Each feature is associated with an RBAC role and you will need to know which role is allowed to run a
command, make modifications to the switch, or view the output of the command. To determine which
RBAC role you need to run a command, review the section "Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)" of
the Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide .
Fabric Watch licensing
Fabric Watch is an optionally licensed feature of Fabric OS. Refer to the Fabric OS Software Licensing
Guide for more information about licensing and how to obtain the Fabric Watch license key.
Reasons to customize Fabric Watch settings
Customization is recommended to achieve the following objectives:
• Selecting one or more event settings
• Selecting an appropriate message delivery method for critical and noncritical events
• Selecting appropriate thresholds and alarm levels relevant to each class element
• Defining the appropriate Time Base event triggering based on the class element traits
• Eliminating message delivery that has little or no practical value to the SAN administrator
• Consolidating multiple messages generated from a single event
Before you begin an implementation, make some decisions surrounding the major configuration tasks:
monitoring and configuring thresholds, actions, events, time bases, and alerts. These tasks are
discussed in the following sections.
Event behavior configuration
You must first use the fwSetToCustom command to switch from default to custom settings, and then
use the advanced configuration options provided with the portThConfig, thConfig, and sysMonitor
commands to configure event behavior, actions, and time bases at the port level.
Role-based access control
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