394 Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide
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Top Talker monitors
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The Top Talker monitor is based on SID/DID and not WWNs. Once Top Talker is installed on a switch
or port, it remains installed across power cycles.
Top Talkers supports two modes, port mode and fabric mode:
•Port mode Top Talker
A Top Talker monitor can be installed on an F_Port to measure the traffic originating from the
F_Port and flowing to different destinations.
•Fabric mode Top Talker
In fabric mode, Top Talker monitors are installed on E_Ports in the fabric and measure the data
rate of all the possible flows in the fabric (ingress E_Port traffic only). In fabric mode, Top Talker
monitors can determine the top n bandwidth users on a given switch.
You can install Top Talker monitors either in port mode or fabric mode, but not both.
NOTE
A fabric mode Top Talker monitor and an end-to-end monitor cannot be configured on the same
fabric. You must delete the end-to-end monitor before you configure the fabric mode Top Talker.
How do Top Talker monitors differ from end-to-end monitors? End-to-end monitors provide counter
statistics for traffic flowing between a given SID-DID pair. Top Talker monitors identify all possible
SID-DID flow combinations that are possible on a given port and provides a sorted output of the top
talking flows. Also, if the number of flows exceeds the hardware resources, existing end-to-end
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 and end-to-end monitors. You cannot use fabric mode
Top Talker monitors and end-to-end monitors together on the same logical switch.
Admin Domain considerations: Top Talker monitors are always installed in AD255.
NPIV considerations: Top Talker takes NPIV devices into consideration when calculating the top
talking flows.

Adding a Top Talker monitor on an F_Port

1. Connect to the switch and log in as admin.
2. Enter the perfTTmon --add command.
perfttmon --add [egress | ingress] [slotnumber/]port
For example, to monitor the incoming traffic on port 7:
perfttmon --add ingress 7
To monitor the outgoing traffic on slot 2, port 4 on the Brocade 48000, Brocade DCX, or
DCX-4S:
perfttmon --add egress 2/4

Adding Top Talker monitors on all switches in the fabric (fabric mode)

When fabric mode is enabled, you can no longer install Top Talker monitors on an F_Port unless you
delete fabric mode.