Blog O’ Matty

Viewing port utilization on Brocade switches

The Brocade Silkworm family of switches maintain a number of important performance and reliability counters for each switch port. Performance and reliability counters for specific switch ports can be viewed with the porterrshow, portshow and portStatsShow commands. To view system wide throughput statistics, the portPerfShow command can be run with an optional interval:

switch1:admin> portPerfShow 5

      0    1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9   10   11   12   13   14   15  Total
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      0    0   21m  28m  31m   0  8.4m   0   28m  21m  31m   0  8.4m   0    0    0  178m
      0    0   20m  29m  31m   0   10m   0   29m  20m  31m   0   10m   0    0    0  182m
      0    0   18m  36m  31m   0   14m   0   36m  18m  31m   0   14m   0    0    0  201m
      0    0   17m  34m  30m   0  7.0m   0   34m  17m  31m   0  7.0m   0    0    0  179m

The individual switch ports are listed above the dashes, and the numbers below the dashes contain the number of bytes transmitted and received per second. This is a super useful tool for getting a high level overview of what your switch is doing.

matty on July 15, 2007 | Filed Under Storage Area Networking

5 Comments

Danny on July 26th, 2007

Do you know how to save portperfshow log as txt files ?

matty on July 29th, 2007

Hi Danny,

You could accomplish this with expect.

Thanks,
- Ryan

Danny on July 31st, 2007

Sorry , Matty
I know the command “portperfshow” can be run with an optional interval for real-time monitor.
but it seems only can print on screen.
I want to know is there any way to save the statistics data as a text file ?
thanks again.

Danny on July 31st, 2007

I understand what you mean, a program “expect” , right ?

Thank you very much

Manu on November 29th, 2007

Another, more simple, option is use PuTTY (allow ssh and telnet protocol) for the connection to the switch.
Whith PuTTY you can save the full session output to a file.

Anyway I agree that “expect” is a more professional option.