Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 511
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Top Talker monitors
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How do Top Talker monitors differ from EE monitors? EE monitors provide counter statistics for
traffic flowing between a given SID and DID pair. Top Talker monitors identify all possible SID and
DID flow combinations that are possible on a given port and provide a sorted output of the top
talking flows. Also, if the number of flows exceeds the hardware resources, existing EE monitors fail
to get real-time data for all of them; however, Top Talker monitors can monitor all flows for a given
E_Port or F_Port.
Virtual Fabric considerations: All logical switches in the same chassis can use either fabric mode
Top Talker monitors or port mode Top Talker monitors and EE monitors. You cannot use fabric mode
Top Talker monitors and EE monitors together on the same logical switch.
Admin Domain considerations: Top Talker monitors are always installed in AD255.
NPIV considerations: Top Talker monitors take NPIV devices into consideration when calculating the
top talking flows.
Top Talker monitors are not supported on the embedded platforms: Brocade 5410, 5424, 5450,
5460, 5470, and 5480.
Top Talker monitors and FC-FC routing
You can enable Top Talker monitors on a platform that is configured to be an FC router. Top Talker
monitors and FC routers are concurrently supported on the following platforms:
• Brocade 6505
• Brocade 6510
• Brocade 6520
• Brocade DCX 8510 Backbone family, with the following blades only: FC16-32, FC16-48.
On all other platforms, you can have either Top Talker monitors or FC-FC routing, but not both.
Top Talker monitors are supported on an FC router in both backbone-to-edge and edge-to-edge
configurations.
Note the following restrictions:
• An E_Port-attached switch must be connected and merged with the backbone FC router before
you can enable Top Talker monitors on the FC router.
• Fabric mode Top Talker monitors does not support requests for domains (either front port
domain or xlate domain).
• Fabric mode Top Talker monitors do not monitor flows over EX_Ports.
For example, if a host is connected directly to an FC router and the target is on the edge switch
(refer to Figure 66 on page 512), no flows are monitored because none of the flows traverse an
E_Port on the FCR.
In Figure 67 on page 512, however, the flows across the E_Port on the FC router are
monitored.
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