Monitoring Brocade Switches

Brocade switches have a built in snmp agent and can be intergated into any of the snmp based monitoring systems like OpenView etc. I am not a fan of snmp and prefer to use Big Brother to monitor network/system status. Big Brother will monitor most everything you're interested in right out of the box and with it's system of plugging in external monitoring scripts it can monitor virtually anything.

To monitor my brocade switches I use Big Brother and 2 external scripts. One script is available from the Big Brother 3rd party plugins repository and the other is one that I wrote myself in conjunction with a utility from the Brocade site.

The one from the plugins repository is a perl script and uses the perl snmp module to collect status information from a list of switches. That script can be viewed here.

The problem is that this script tells me about power supply failures and fans etc but doesn't tell me when something else causes the switch to change from Healthy/OK to Marginal. It is pretty crucial to know if your switch is in a marginal state. The solution was to create a Big Brother plugin that would telnet into a switch and collect the output of the "switchStatusShow" command. I found a tool that would do the telnet part from Brocade and wrote a Big Brother plugin script to connect it to Big Brother.