The sections in this chapter describe the basic installation and configuration steps necessary to run Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) on your systems. The following major sections are included:
“Product Structure”, describes the main packages of PCP software and how they must be installed on each system.
“License Constraints”, describes the licensing issues necessary to operate PCP in a distributed computing environment.
“Installing and Testing Performance Co-Pilot”, describes where to find information on installing and testing PCP.
In a typical deployment, Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) would be installed in a collector configuration on one or more hosts, from which the performance information could then be collected, and in a monitor configuration on one or more workstations, from which the performance of the server systems could then be monitored.
PCP is presented as two sets of products; the foundation product components that are provided as part of the IRIX operating system ( pcp_eoe) and the enhancement product components that are available to add to the existing PCP distribution (pcp and pcp_gifts). To install and use the pcp subsystems, pcp_eoe must be installed from your IRIX operating system distribution CDs. The pcp_eoe and pcp modules can be installed at the same time, but pcp_eoe is a prerequisite for pcp to operate.
PCP is packaged into a number of basic subsystem types that reflect the functional role of the product components. These subsystems may be installed using the inst or swmgr command:
For complete information on the installable software packages, see the Performance Co-Pilot release notes. For additional information, see the relnotes(1) or grelnotes(1) man pages.
On Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) monitoring systems, all of the display, visualization, and automated reasoning tools are licensed using “nodelocked” FLEXlm licenses. On PCP collection systems, the Performance Metrics Collection Daemon (PMCD) is also licensed using “nodelocked” FLEXlm licenses. Refer to the PCP release notes for details.
The other PCP tools and services (for example, the Performance Metrics Domain Agents (PMDAs) or pmlogger) may be installed and executed without license constraints.
Some of the PCP maintenance tools for updating the Performance Metrics Name Space (PMNS), interrogating the Performance Metrics Collection Subsystem (PMCS), dumping an archive log, and so on, are not constrained by any license restrictions.
The pmbrand command manages the /var/pcp/pmns/Brand file, which contains binary information about PCP capabilities enabled by the various valid licenses on the system. If you are unsure of the license status for a particular host, pmbrand verifies and prints the current license information on that system, producing output similar to the following:
/usr/pcp/bin/pmbrand -l
Licenses for system 690794d70
PCP Collector
PCP Monitor |