Adding Brocade switches and fabrics

To detect, investigate, and resolve bandwidth and latency issues, monitor switches and fabrics. Key metadata is collected, analyzed, and presented in IBM Storage Insights so that you can investigate and track performance from the hosts, such as application servers, through the components of the SAN fabric to the storage systems.

Before you begin

To collect metadata from fabrics, switches, and storage systems, you deploy data collectors. If you deployed data collectors to collect metadata from your storage systems, these data collectors can also collect fabric and switch metadata. You can also deploy more data collectors to distribute and optimize the collection workload.

Keep in the mind the following requirements before you add Brocade switches and fabrics for monitoring:
  • You must have the administrator role in IBM Storage Insights. For more information about roles, see Adding and removing users.
  • You must add the IP address or switch name and credentials for all the chassis that host the switches in the fabric. If other chassis in the same fabric has the same username, password, protocol, and port they can be added automatically. Switches that are added automatically that do not have the supported firmware or that have different credentials are set to condition ‘Not Monitored’.
    Note: NPV mode switch chassis are not part of a fabric and must be added individually.

About this task

When you add switches, asset, configuration, and performance metadata is collected, analyzed, and shown in the IBM Storage Insights. If the switch belongs to a fabric, inventory and configuration metadata about the fabrics is also collected, analyzed, and shown in IBM Storage Insights.

You can add one or more switches. To add multiple switches, the switches must share the same authentication credentials.

Figure 1. Workflow for adding switches and fabrics
Adding switches and fabrics

Procedure

To add brocade switches, complete the following steps:

  1. From modern UI:
    1. Select Main menu > Overview.
    2. Select any device in the left panel when all the block storage systems are loaded. It opens the individual device overview page.
    3. Click the dashboard selection dropdown in the left panel and select Fabrics.
    4. Select Add switches, in the three dots menu of Fabrics.
    5. Select Brocade or Cisco in the pop-up.
      To connect and collect metadata for the switches, you must have a user or admin account with chassis-role privileges.
  2. From classic UI:
    1. From the Resources menu, click Switches and then click Add Switch or click Fabrics and then click Add Fabric.
    2. Click Brocade and specify the connection information.
      To connect and collect metadata for the switches and fabrics, you must have a user or admin account with chassis-role privileges.

Results

Inventory, configuration, and, performance metadata is collected and analyzed for the switches and inventory and configuration metadata is collected and analyzed for the fabrics that the switches belong to. If a switch is configured as a virtual or logical switch, metadata is also collected about these switches and their associated virtual fabrics.

What to do next

When Brocade switches are added, other switches in the same fabric are discovered. If the discovered switches have the same authentication credentials as the switches that were added, they are automatically added for monitoring. If the switches do not have the same authentication credentials, you must configure them for data collection.

To identify and configure the switches for data collection, complete these steps:

From modern UI:
  1. Select Main menu > Chassis.
  2. Click on the three dots menu of the switch to be configured and select Data Collection and then select the required action.
From classic UI:
  1. Click Resources and then click Switches.
  2. Select the Chassis tab.
  3. Select the Brocade switch or switches that have the same authentication credentials. Right click on it and select Data Collection and then select the required action.