Brocade FICON Administrator’s Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) - Manual (Page 89)

Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite
The Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite (MAPS) is an optional storage area network (SAN) health
monitor supported on all switches running Fabric OS 7.2.0. MAPS allows you to enable each switch to
constantly monitor itself for potential faults and automatically alerts you to problems before they become
costly failures.
MAPS tracks a variety of SAN fabric metrics and events. Monitoring fabric-wide events, ports, and
environmental parameters enables early fault detection and isolation as well as performance
measurements.
MAPS provides the following set of predefined monitoring policies that allow you to immediately use
MAPS on activation:
• dflt_conservative_policy
• dflt_moderate_policy
• dflt_aggressive_policy
It is recommended that all System z customers enable MAPS after upgrading to Fabric OS version
supporting MAPS and use the default aggressive policy (dflt_aggressive_policy). This policy contains
rules with very strict thresholds. For details on enabling MAPS and monitoring policies, refer to the
Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite Administrator's Guide.
Port fencing
Occasionally, bad optics and cables can cause errors to occur at such a rapid rate that error processing
and RSCN transmission and processing results in fabric performance problems. Port fencing allows you
to limit the number of errors a port can receive by forcing a port offline when certain error thresholds are
met.
The port fencing feature is configured through Fabric Watch. For more information on configuring port
fencing, refer to the Fabric Watch Administrator's Guide.
Defining port fencing
The following overview defines port fencing.
1. (Optional) Clear all alarms.
2. Define threshold levels.
3. Define alarm action.
4. Activate alarming.
NOTE
Establish a Telnet session with a tool such as PuTTy that allows the columns to be increased. This
is because some of the displays use more than the standard 80 columns that programs such as
HyperTerminal support. The recommended number of columns is 120.
Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite
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