# Switch Health Alerts

**Purpose:** Which switch and which port. Every fabric alert with its severity, category, alert type, and target port, using the same acknowledgment, auto-acknowledge, and ServiceNow model as the other alert screens.

![Switch Health Alerts grid listing severity, category, alert type, alert target and acknowledgment state per fibre channel alert, with device names and targets redacted](https://visualoneintelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/voi-docs-switches-health-alerts.png)

## When to use it

- Locate the specific switch and port behind a rising error count
- Establish whether errors are concentrated on one device or spread across the fabric
- Produce a port list for someone to inspect optics and cabling against
- Escalate a fabric problem into an incident with its context intact

## Key areas and metrics

| Column | What it holds |
| --- | --- |
| ID | Numeric alert identifier |
| Severity | Shown as an icon |
| Device Name | The switch that raised it |
| Category | The condition class, for example errors and other conditions |
| Alert | The fibre channel condition, for example link failure or an input or output primitive sequence error |
| Alert Target | The specific port the condition applies to |
| Description | The detail, naming the port and channel |
| Acknowledged? | Current acknowledgment state |
| ServiceNOW | Per-row escalation state |

Controls match the other alert screens: acknowledged and severity filters, a **Set all switch alerts to auto** toggle, row selection with a ten-row acknowledgment cap, a ServiceNow menu, and the standard grid with search and row grouping.

## One port produces many alerts

A single failing port generates a cluster of different alert types together, because the failure modes cascade. A degraded optic loses signal lock, which fails the link, which triggers a reset, which produces primitive sequence errors in both directions. Each is reported separately.

So a record count in the thousands does not mean thousands of problems. Group by Alert Target and the same queue usually collapses to a handful of ports, which is the actual worklist. Doing that before reading rows is the difference between an afternoon and a week.

## Common actions

- **Group by Alert Target first.** It converts an alert flood into a port list.
- **Then group by Device Name** to see whether the affected ports share a switch, which points at the switch rather than the optics.
- **Hand the port list to whoever can inspect the physical layer.** Most conditions here are cables, connectors, and optics.
- **Acknowledge only after the port has been remediated and the next collection confirms it.**

## Tips

> Auto-acknowledge is a poor fit for this screen. Fabric alerts arrive in volume from a small number of physical faults, so suppressing them hides the fault rather than the noise. Group instead.

## Related screens

[Enterprise SAN Switch Summary](https://visualoneintelligence.com/docs/switches-summary/) shows whether these alerts are increasing in aggregate. [Host LUNs](https://visualoneintelligence.com/docs/hosts-host-luns/) shows which LUNs are affected by a faulty port. [Storage Health Alerts](https://visualoneintelligence.com/docs/storage-health-alerts/) covers the array end of the same path.

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Source: https://visualoneintelligence.com/docs/switches-health-alerts/