Fabric Elements Test
A switched fabric is a point-to-point switch-based interconnect designed for fault tolerance and scalability, and is configured, verified and managed by an element manager in the network environment. A point-to-point switch fabric element ensures that every link has exactly one device connected at each end of the link. Thus, the loading and termination operations are well controlled and, with only one device allowed, peak I/O performance of the switch is guaranteed with fabric elements. The fabric elements provide scalability which can be accomplished by adding the target switch to the fabric and connecting more endnodes through the switch. The aggregate bandwidth of the switch increases as the target switch is additional switches are added to the network. Multiple paths between devices keep the aggregate bandwidth high and provide fail-safe, redundant connections. Since fabric elements provide both network connectivity and management capabilities for the InfiniBand Switch, an inoperable fabric element can halt the communication between the target switch and other end-nodes in the environment. To avoid this, administrators should continuously track the status of the fabric elements that are connected to the target switch. This is what exactly the Fabric Elements test does!
This test auto-discovers the fabric elements connected to the target Infiniband switch, and for each fabric element, reports the current operational status and availability of the element manager.
Target of the test : An InfiniBand Switch
Agent deploying the test : An external agent
Outputs of the test : One set of results for each fabric element connected to the InfiniBand Switch to be monitored.
Parameter | Description |
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Test period |
How often should the test be executed |
Host |
The IP address of the target switch that is being monitored. |
SNMPPort |
The port at which the monitored target exposes its SNMP MIB; the default is 161. |
SNMPVersion |
By default, the eG agent supports SNMP version 1. Accordingly, the default selection in the SNMPversion list is v1. However, if a different SNMP framework is in use in your environment, say SNMP v2 or v3, then select the corresponding option from this list. |
SNMPCommunity |
The SNMP community name that the test uses to communicate with the switch. This parameter is specific to SNMP v1 and v2 only. Therefore, if the SNMPVersion chosen is v3, then this parameter will not appear. |
Username |
This parameter appears only when v3 is selected as the SNMPVersion. SNMP version 3 (SNMPv3) is an extensible SNMP Framework which supplements the SNMPv2 Framework, by additionally supporting message security, access control, and remote SNMP configuration capabilities. To extract performance statistics from the MIB using the highly secure SNMP v3 protocol, the eG agent has to be configured with the required access privileges – in other words, the eG agent should connect to the MIB using the credentials of a user with access permissions to be MIB. Therefore, specify the name of such a user against this parameter. |
Context |
This parameter appears only when v3 is selected as the SNMPVersion. An SNMP context is a collection of management information accessible by an SNMP entity. An item of management information may exist in more than one context and an SNMP entity potentially has access to many contexts. A context is identified by the SNMPEngineID value of the entity hosting the management information (also called a contextEngineID) and a context name that identifies the specific context (also called a contextName). If the Username provided is associated with a context name, then the eG agent will be able to poll the MIB and collect metrics only if it is configured with the context name as well. In such cases therefore, specify the context name of the Username in the Context text box. By default, this parameter is set to none. |
AuthPass |
Specify the password that corresponds to the above-mentioned Username. This parameter once again appears only if the SNMPversion selected is v3. |
Confirm Password |
Confirm the AuthPass by retyping it here. |
AuthType |
This parameter too appears only if v3 is selected as the SNMPVersion. From the AuthType list box, choose the authentication algorithm using which SNMP v3 converts the specified Username and password into a 32-bit format to ensure security of SNMP transactions. You can choose between the following options:
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EncryptFlag |
This flag appears only when v3 is selected as the SNMPVersion. By default, the eG agent does not encrypt SNMP requests. Accordingly, the this flag is set to No by default. To ensure that SNMP requests sent by the eG agent are encrypted, select the Yes option. |
EncryptType |
If this EncryptFlag is set to Yes, then you will have to mention the encryption type by selecting an option from the EncryptType list. SNMP v3 supports the following encryption types:
|
EncryptPassword |
Specify the encryption password here. |
Confirm Password |
Confirm the encryption password by retyping it here. |
Timeout |
Specify the duration (in seconds) within which the SNMP query executed by this test should time out in this text box. The default is 10 seconds. |
Data Over TCP |
By default, in an IT environment, all data transmission occurs over UDP. Some environments however, may be specifically configured to offload a fraction of the data traffic – for instance, certain types of data traffic or traffic pertaining to specific components – to other protocols like TCP, so as to prevent UDP overloads. In such environments, you can instruct the eG agent to conduct the SNMP data traffic related to the monitored target over TCP (and not UDP). For this, set this flag to Yes. By default, this flag is set to No. |
EngineID |
This parameter appears only when v3 is selected as the SNMPVersion. Sometimes, the test may not report metrics when AES192 or AES256 is chosen as the Encryption type. To ensure that the test report metrics consistently, administrators need to set this flag to Yes. By default, this parameter is set to No. |
Detailed Diagnosis |
To make diagnosis more efficient and accurate, the eG Enterprise embeds an optional detailed diagnostic capability. With this capability, the eG agents can be configured to run detailed, more elaborate tests as and when specific problems are detected. To enable the detailed diagnosis capability of this test for a particular server, choose the On option. To disable the capability, click on the Off option. The option to selectively enable/disable the detailed diagnosis capability will be available only if the following conditions are fulfilled:
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Measurement | Description | Measurement Unit | Interpretation | ||||||||
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Operational status |
Indicates the current operational status of this fabric element. |
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The values reported by this measure and its numeric equivalents are mentioned in the table below:
Note: By default, this measure reports the Measure Values listed in the table above to indicate the operational status of this fabric element. The graph of this measure however, is represented using the numeric equivalents only. |
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Element manager availability |
Indicates the whether/not the element manager is currently available to this fabric element. |
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The values reported by this measure and its numeric equivalents are mentioned in the table below:
Note: By default, this measure reports the Measure Values listed in the table above to indicate the availability of element manager to this fabric element. The graph of this measure however, is represented using the numeric equivalents only. |