Connectrix: What is the 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 or later. This Suite allows user to enable each switch to monitor itself for potential faults and automatically alerts the user to problems before they become costly failures. MAPS tracks various SAN fabric metrics and events. Monitoring fabric-wide events, ports, and environmental parameters enable early fault detection and isolation as well as performance measurements. MAPS provides predefined monitoring policies that allow the user to immediately use MAPS on activation.

Predefined policies:
MAPS provides three predefined policies that you cannot modify or delete:

• dflt_moderate_policy

• dflt_aggressive_policy

• dflt_conservative_policy

Although the preconfigured policies cannot be modified, a policy can be created based on these policies. 

User-defined policies
MAPS allows user to define their own policies. User can create a policy and add rules to it, or can clone one of the default policies and modify the cloned policy. 
 
In addition, MAPS provides customizable monitoring thresholds. These allow user to configure specific groups of ports or other elements so that they share a common threshold value. User can configure MAPS to provide notifications before problems arise, for example, when network traffic through a port is approaching the bandwidth limit. MAPS lets the user define how often to check each switch and fabric measure and specify notification thresholds. Whenever fabric measures exceed these thresholds, MAPS automatically provides notification using several methods, including email messages, SNMP traps, and log entries.

The MAPS dashboard provides users with the ability to view in a quick glance what is happening on the switch. It helps administrators examine details of exactly what is happening on the switch (for example, the kinds of errors, the error count, and so on.)

MAPS provides a seamless migration of all customized Fabric Watch thresholds to MAPS, thus allowing you to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of MAPS. MAPS provides additional advanced monitoring, such as monitoring for the same error counters across different time periods, or having more than two thresholds for any error counters. MAPS also provides support for the user to monitor the statistics provided by the Flow Monitor feature of Flow Vision.

MAPS configuration tasks

For more information, refer to the respective FOS version s MAPS guide.