This guide describes the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) software package of advanced performance tools for the SGI family of graphical workstations and servers.
The Performance Co-Pilot User's and Administrator's Guide documents both the PCP features that are embedded in the IRIX operating system and those that are in the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) software package, which users purchase separately.
The Performance Co-Pilot IRIX Base Software Administrator's Guide documents the PCP features that are embedded in the IRIX operating system. This manual is a subset of the Performance Co-Pilot User's and Administrator's Guide.
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 an introduction, 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, pmdumptext, pmval, 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 man 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, including IRIX Admin: System Configuration and Operation, and the Personal System Administration Guide as hard copy 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.
Additional resources include man pages, release notes, and SGI web sites.
The IRIX man pages provide concise reference information on the use of IRIX commands, subroutines, and system resources. There is usually a man page for each PCP command or subroutine. To see a list of all the PCP man pages, enter the following command:
man -k performance |
To see a particular man page, supply its name to the man command, for example:
man pcp |
The man pages are divided into the following seven sections:
| (1) | General commands |
| (2) | System calls and error numbers |
| (3) | Library subroutines |
| (4) | File formats |
| (5) | Miscellaneous |
| (6) | Demos and games |
| (7) | Special files |
When referring to man pages, this guide follows a standard UNIX convention: the section number in parentheses follows the item. For example, PMDA(3) refers to the man page in section 3 for the pmda command.
Release notes provide specific information about the current release, available online through the relnotes(1) 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 |
The SGI general Web site, with search capability.
http://www.sgi.com/software |
Links to Performance Co-Pilot product information.
http://techpubs.sgi.com |
The SGI Technical Publications Library.
To order a document, call +1 651 683 5907. SGI employees may send e-mail to orderdsk@sgi.com.
Customers outside of the United States and Canada should contact their local service organization for ordering and documentation information.
These type conventions and symbols are used in this guide:
| Italics | Italic typeface denotes variable entries and words or concepts being defined. | |
| Fixed-width type | This fixed-space font denotes literal items such as commands, files, routines, path names, signals, keys, messages, error messages, prompts, onscreen text, and programming language structures. | |
| Bold fixed-width type | This bold, fixed-space font denotes literal items that the user enters in interactive sessions. Output is shown in nonbold, fixed-space font. | |
| ALL CAPS | All capital letters denote environment variables, operator names, directives, defined constants, and macros in C programs. | |
| () | Parentheses that follow function names surround function arguments or are empty if the function has no arguments; parentheses that follow IRIX commands surround man page section numbers. | |
| [] | Brackets surround optional syntax statement arguments. | |
| # | The pound character is the IRIX shell prompt for the superuser (root). | |
| % | The percent character is the IRIX shell prompt for users other than the superuser. | |
| >> | Two greater than characters denote the Command Monitor prompt. |
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