Hey all,
Wherever you are in the world, if you are a Cloud Insights user, you will no longer see the "Preview" label on our Brocade / Broadcom FOS REST collector thanks to deployments earlier this week. In the past quarter, we have been refining and enhancing our approach, and we think this collector is ready for general usage.
There are a few aspects to consider:
FOS introduced their REST API with FOS 8.2. But some features like routing only received REST API capabilities with 9.0 = if you are a Brocade routing shop, if you are NOT yet on 9, you probably want to wait to switch to REST
If you have a fabric consisting of mixed FOS assets 8.2 higher, but with some < 8.2, your CI FOS REST collector WILL fail to discover those older assets. You can edit your FOS REST collector, and build a comma delimited list of the IPv4 address of those devices for exclusion from that collector = this will stop this collector from reporting "Partial Success...." Your strategy for discovering earlier assets should be our Brocade CLI+SNMP based collector.
We general expect that CI users will find this collector much easier to deploy - the historical Brocade CLI+SNMP collector requires both an appropriate user account AND correct SNMP configuration for both inventory and performance collection success - the FOS REST collector is purely REST API based.
Finally, this collector is also doing something I find pretty cool - to continue the theme of improving usability, we are dynamically attempting to speak to each switch with both HTTP and HTTPS as Brocade FOS devices only want to speak one of those - if your switch has a digital certificate installed, it blocks HTTP data flow via REST. If your switch does not have a digital certificate installed, TCP port 443 has nothing listening, such that inbound requests from CI result in a TCP timeout.
So, this collector has some options to change protocol from HTTPS to HTTP much like many of our collector types, but that simply changes the order in what we attempt first - we will try the other in the first fails before presenting any errors.
So, all things considered, I am very optimistic folks will find our FOS REST collector much easier to deploy and maintain.
Matt
