Brocade DCX Fiber switch SSH polling?

akhasheni

Hi all,

We have a few Brocade Silkworm DCX Fiber switches. Is it possible to poll them via SSH and add the collected data as custom metrics in SolarWinds NPM (or SAM)?

Reason I ask: it looks like these switches do not provide port error counts (a super important metric) via SNMP:

• Brocade Fiberchannel Interface errors missing
• Brocade Fiberchannel interface error stats missing?

(Shocking but apparently true.)

There is a fairly simple way to SSH into the switch, run a shell command that would output the needed data in plain text. Suppose we could write a simple script polling the switches and dumping the collected data somewhere. Is it easy to add that data to SolarWinds, ideally so that the error counts would automagically get associated with specific ports already polled via SNMP?

If not, what would you recommend? (Something like Splunk or New Relic where it's fairly straightforward to add a custom metric collected via a script?)

Thanks!

stuartd

I'm not familiar with Brocade kit but presumably if it is monitorable via SNMP, then they (Brocade) also have MIBs. If you can find an appropriate MIB and search it, or even ask Brocade or on a dedicated forum if there is an OID for port errors - then you could build a UnDP.

Another option would be an SNMP Walk of the node, and then search the resultant text file for the error count. This works well if the error count is fairly static and unique. i.e. if it's 1 and you try searching for 1 you will get 100's of hits.