The Performance Metrics Inference Engine ( pmie) is a tool that provides automated monitoring of, and reasoning about, system performance within the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) framework.
The following major sections in this chapter are as follows:
“Creating pmie Rules with pmrules”, provides a brief description of how to use the pmrules GUI for creating pmie rules from parameterized templates.
This chapter only provides descriptions about tools and services which are not provided in the foundation components of PCP. For an introduction to pmie and its features and details of other pmie tools, see Chapter 5, “Performance Metrics Inference Engine” in the Performance Co-Pilot for IRIX User's and Administrator's Guide.
The GUI tool pmrules may be used to generate pmie rules from templates that are shipped with PCP as shown in Procedure 6-1. These templates are parameterized versions of rules describing common performance scenarios suited for pmie monitoring.
Procedure 6-1. Creating pmie Rules
Start pmrules, and choose Import... from the Template menu.
Click the Choose File... button in the “Import template(s) from file” dialog.
Sample templates are installed in the directory /var/pcp/config/pmrules .
Double-click the pcp directory in the pmrules directory browser window.
An Import template(s) from file dialog appears, as shown in Figure 6-1.
Select the desired templates, click OK, and return to the pmrules main window, which appears similar to the one shown in Figure 6-2.
Double-click the desired template, and the pmrules Edit template dialog displays, similar to the one shown in Figure 6-3.
At this point, you can customize the template by assigning values to the threshold, delta, and holdoff Parameters text boxes, then either selecting one of the predefined Actions , or specifying your own custom user action.
When you are finished customizing the template, click OK and return to the main pmrules window.
Choose Save As from the File menu, and provide a new name for your private copy of the pmrules template file.
Two files are saved. The first one takes the given filename and is your private copy of the pmrules template file. The second file takes the given filename with the suffix .pmie appended and contains the pmie rules--this second file should be given as an argument to pmie.
You can also create new templates for other performance problems. These can then be included in the template collection available to pmrules, and then used to customize instances of the pmie rules for particular hosts.
See the pmrules(1) man page for a complete description of the capabilities of the pmrules tool.