Enabling MAPS to get better alerts and notification control

Hi,

We have never used Fabric Watch on any of our DSxxxxB switches but recently bought a few 6510's with Fabric Vision. My question is whether enabling MAPS on a switch changes its personality in a way that would make existing monitoring or alerting via ViPR SRM be different for that switch as opposed to those without it(Fabric Vision) licensed and MAPS enabled? What we are ultimately trying to do is setup alerts for events such as a port changing state from online to offline and staying that way for an hour which it appears is impossible with just using basic (free) event notification in CMCNE. Enabling MAPS, or so the documentation seems to imply, is really what gets you the additional knobs to turn for precise event notifications, correct?

Yes, we have ViPR SRM collecting information from the switches and CMCNE, but it still looks like the native tools with the proper license has an easier way of customizing alerts. We are trying to figure out which way is the optimal way to go about this, thus the question of whether MAPS is "it" or if writing a script to monitor this stuff is what people wind up doing regardless of the packaged app options.

thanks