This guide describes the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) software package of advanced performance tools for the SGI family of IA-64 servers running the Linux operating system.
The Performance Co-Pilot for IA-64 Linux User's and Administrator's Guide documents the the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) software package.
PCP 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 (DBMSs), 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”, describes the user interface components that are common to most of the text-based utilities that make up the monitor portion of PCP.
Chapter 4, “Monitoring System Performance” , describes the performance monitoring tools available in Performance Co-Pilot (PCP).
Chapter 5, “Performance Metrics Inference Engine”, describes the Performance Metrics Inference Engine (pmie) tool that provides automated monitoring of, and reasoning about, system performance within the PCP framework.
Chapter 6, “Archive Logging”, covers the PCP services and utilities that support archive logging for capturing accurate historical performance records.
Chapter 7, “Performance Co-Pilot Deployment Strategies”, presents the various options for deploying PCP functionality across systems spanning the enterprise.
Chapter 8, “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 and in the man pages for Performance Co-Pilot.
This guide is written for the system administrator or performance analyst who is directly using and administering PCP applications.
The Performance Co-Pilot Programmer's Guide, a companion document to the Performance Co-Pilot for IA-64 Linux User's and Administrator's Guide, is intended for application developers who want 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 and SGI Web sites.
The following Web sites are accessible to everyone with general Internet access:
| URL | Description |
| 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://oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp | Some parts of the PCP infrastructure that have also been released as open source |
To obtain SGI documentation, go to the SGI Technical Publications Library at http://docs.sgi.com .
The following conventions are used throughout this document:
| Convention | Meaning | |
| command | This fixed-space font denotes literal items such as commands, files, routines, path names, signals, messages, and programming language structures. | |
| variable | Italic typeface denotes variable entries and words or concepts being defined. | |
| user input | This bold, fixed-space font denotes literal items that the user enters in interactive sessions. (Output is shown in nonbold, fixed-space font.) | |
| [ ] | Brackets enclose optional portions of a command or directive line. | |
| ... | Ellipses indicate that a preceding element can be repeated. | |
| 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 Linux commands surround man page section numbers. |
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