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The Brocade Fabric OS connector is part of the Enterprise Edition, and ships as beta. It has been verified against a simulator on a 9.1.0b schema baseline, not yet against real hardware — see What “beta” means here.
Bag of words queries a Brocade SAN switch over its Fabric OS REST API so the agent can investigate Fibre Channel problems: port health, counters, optics, congestion, zoning and retained events, presented as tables. Every vendor request is explicitly allowlisted and read-only, over a bounded REST path.

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What the catalog looks like

The default catalog is 12 primary investigation tables. A further 156 tables are available opt-in via Include advanced diagnostic tables.

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Evidence columns

Every row carries provenance alongside the data, so a finding can be traced back to what was actually observed and when:
Read the table semantics literally when drawing conclusions. A defined zone configuration does not prove active access — check the effective one. Monitoring-paused is not no-congestion, so an empty congestion_samples window is not evidence of a healthy fabric. And complete retrieval of events does not guarantee the switch retained the history you asked for — that is what _bow_history_coverage is for.

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Before you start

  • A switch account with read access to the required fabrics.
  • The switch’s HTTPS management address, reachable from the Bag of words backend.
  • If you run Virtual Fabrics, know which fabric IDs you care about. Every logical-switch query must specify a fabric ID.

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Fields

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Authentication

Username + Password — userpass (scopes: system and user) Because the mode is available at user scope as well, each analyst can supply their own switch login instead of sharing one. Per-user authentication on a database-style connection requires an Enterprise license — see Authentication and access.

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What “beta” means here

The connector bundles a Fabric OS 9.1.0b YANG baseline, reconciled at connect time against live module discovery on your switch. It has been verified against a simulator; compatibility with customer firmware (9.1.1c and beyond) still requires a real-hardware acceptance pass. Validate on a non-production fabric first, and treat field names as less stable than on a generally-available connector.

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Troubleshooting

Switch the login_scheme between Custom_Basic and Basic — Fabric OS versions differ in which they accept.
Every logical-switch query needs a fabric ID. Set vf_ids on the connection, or specify the fabric in the query.
It is probably one of the 156 advanced tables. Turn on Include advanced diagnostic tables and re-index.
Check _bow_history_coverage and _bow_complete on neighbouring rows. Retention on the switch, or paused monitoring, is the usual explanation — not absence of the condition.