This guide describes the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) software package of advanced performance tools for the Silicon Graphics family of graphical workstations and servers. Performance Co-Pilot provides a systems-level suite of tools that cooperate to deliver integrated performance monitoring and performance management services spanning the hardware platforms, operating systems, service layers, database management systems, and user applications.
“About This Guide” includes short descriptions of the chapters in this book, directs you to additional sources of information, and explains typographical conventions.
This guide contains the following chapters:
Chapter 1, “Introduction to Performance Co-Pilot,” provides a brief overview of the software components and conceptual foundations of the PCP product.
Chapter 2, “Installing and Configuring Performance Co-Pilot,” describes the basic installation and configuration steps necessary to get PCP running on your systems.
Chapter 3, “Common Conventions and Arguments,” summarizes user interface components that are common to most of the graphical tools and text-based utilities that constitute the PCP monitor software.
Chapter 4, “Monitoring System Performance,” describes the basic interactive performance monitoring tools available in PCP, including pmchart, pmgadgets, pmkstat, pmval, pmdumptext, pmem, pminfo, and pmstore.
Chapter 5, “System Performance Visualization Tools,” discusses the various 3D visualization tools that are provided to enable high-level monitoring, management, and diagnosis for performance problems.
Chapter 6, “Performance Metrics Inference Engine,” introduces the automated reasoning facilities of PCP that provide both real-time and retrospective filtering of performance data to identify adverse performance scenarios and raise alarms.
Chapter 7, “Archive Logging,” covers the PCP services and utilities that support archive logging for capturing accurate historical performance records.
Chapter 8, “Performance Co-Pilot Deployment Strategies,” presents the various options for deploying PCP functionality across systems spanning the enterprise.
Chapter 9, “Customizing and Extending PCP Services,” describes the procedures necessary to ensure that the PCP configuration is customized in ways that maximize the coverage and quality of performance monitoring and management services.
Appendix A, “Acronyms,” provides a comprehensive list of the acronyms used in this guide, in the reference pages, and in the release notes for Performance Co-Pilot.
This guide is written for the system administrator or performance analyst who is directly using and administering PCP applications. It is assumed that you have installed IRIS InSight for viewing online books, or have access to the IRIX Admin manual set and the Personal System Administration Guide as hardcopy documents.
The Performance Co-Pilot Programmer's Guide is a companion document intended for application developers who wish to use the PCP framework and services for exporting additional collections of performance metrics, or for delivering new or customized applications to enhance performance management.
The IRIX reference pages (also called “man” or manual pages) provide concise reference information on the use of IRIX commands, subroutines, and system resources. There is usually a reference page for each PCP command or subroutine. To see a list of all the PCP reference pages, enter the following command:
man -k performance |
To see a particular reference page, supply its name to the man command, for example:
man pcp |
The reference pages are divided into seven sections, as shown in Table i. When referring to reference pages, this guide follows a standard UNIX convention: the section number in parentheses follows the item. For example, PMDA(3) refers to the reference page in section 3 for the pmda command.
Table 1. Outline of Reference Page Organization
Type of Reference Page | Section Number |
|---|---|
General commands | (1) |
System calls and error numbers | (2) |
Library subroutines | (3) |
File formats | (4) |
Miscellaneous | (5) |
Demos and games | (6) |
Special files | (7) |
Release notes provide specific information about the current release, available online through the relnotes command. Exceptions to the printed and online documentation are found in the release notes. The grelnotes command provides a graphical interface to the release notes of all products installed on your system.
The following Web sites are accessible to everyone with general Internet access:
| http://www.sgi.com |
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| http://www.sgi.com/Products |
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| http://techpubs.sgi.com/library |
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These type conventions and symbols are used in this guide:
| Bold | Literal command-line arguments (options/flags), nonalphabetic data types, operators, and subroutines. | |
| Italics | Backus-Naur Form entries, command monitor commands, executable names, filenames, IRIX commands, manual/book titles, new terms, onscreen button names, program variables, tools, utilities, variable command-line arguments, variable coordinates, and variables to be supplied by the user in examples, code, and syntax statements | |
| Fixed-width type |
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| Bold fixed-width type |
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| ALL CAPS | Environment variables, operator names, directives, defined constants, macros in C programs | |
| “” | (Double quotation marks) Onscreen menu items and references to document section titles within text | |
| () | (Parentheses) Following function names—surround function arguments or are empty if the function has no arguments; following IRIX commands—surround reference page (man page) section numbers. | |
| [] | (Brackets) Surrounding optional syntax statement arguments | |
| # | IRIX shell prompt for the superuser (root) | |
| % | IRIX shell prompt for users other than the superuser | |
| >> | Command Monitor prompt |