BVQ for Brocade SAN (REST) Platform

Owned by Thomas Sikora
Last updated: 06.05.22
2 min read

Brocade/Broadcom discontinues the Brocade Network Advisor which is currently used by BVQ to collect topology and performance information via SMI/S. 
End of support for the BNA will be 02/08/2022. The free of charge SMI-S Agent will reach its end of support the same day.

As an improved alternative, switch and fabric related information can now be collected from the switches directly using REST API. 
This feature requires Fabric OS 8.2.1 or higher (see Supported Brocade systems).

Refined Object model

Brocade SAN REST Model has been refined to reflect the Brocade API model:

BVQ Brocade SAN (API) Object types.png

Information gathering

While BNA was a single point of entry for BVQ and provided us the data for all switches and fabrics managed by the BNA, it is now necessary to create one scanner instance for each fabric.
For switches having virtual fabrics enabled, a scanner instance for each virtual fabric id is required.

It is recommended to use the fabric principal as the main switch in the scanner configuration. Other switches in the same fabric are discovered automatically by the scanner configuration.
Switches in access gateway mode are not part of the fabric, and hence, have to be added to the configuration manually.

 Example


Additional information:

Additional use cases

The legacy SMI/S interface restricted the available information, that new REST interface now shows.

Once the scanners are collecting data, all topology and performance information known from the previous Brocade module plus a bunch of new attributes and metrics can be explored in BVQ - be it the Expert GUI for a deep dive, Grafana dashboards for a nice graphical overview, or the predefined alert rules which are visualized in the Systems Health map to quickly see the state and health of the SAN configuration.

Especially object type Brocade Switch port offers a whole lot of additional information:

There are many new attributes available showing details like port configuration and it is now possible to monitor the environmental characteristics of the SFPs: New switch port metrics showing temperature, power consumption or electrical details of the transceiver media.