To access the performance status reports, see the Monitoring section of the SGI Internet Server Web administration interface using the following URL:

http://hostname/sgi-iserver/pcp/management.html

From the Monitoring section, you can select one of the following:

You can access the latest reports directly by using the following URLs:

http://hostname/sgi-iserver/pcp
http://hostname/sgi-iserver/pcp/ISE-1hour.gif
http://hostname/sgi-iserver/pcp/ISE-24hour.gif

The status reports are placed in the following directory:

/home/httpd/html/sgi-iserver/pcp

This directory contains all existing previous reports, which include the hour or day of the week in the file name. The hourly images are named as follows:

There will be 24 ISE-1hour.gif files, the oldest of which is overwritten every hour. There will be 7 ISE-24hour.gif files, the oldest of which is overwritten every 24 hours.

Figure 4-1 shows an example report.

Figure 4-1. Example Last Day Report

These images show various charts with a common time-axis. The following subsections describe each chart.

You can add new reports or change the report contents by adding or changing files ending in .options in the /var/pcp/config/pcp-ise directory. Each file ending with the .options suffix specifies the command line options that are passed to pmchart(1), which is the tool used to generate the images. In particular, you can use the -h option to tell pmchart to monitor a remote host (such as another Web server in your environment that has the PCP RPMs installed). The available options for pmchart are fully described in the pmchart(1) man page.

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Note: If you use the -h option to pmchart(1), you must open up the appropriate ports in your ipchains(8) configurations on both systems. In addition, note that the PCP reports produced with the Web administration GUI will always feature the name of the local systems. Because this could cause confusion, SGI does not recommend using the -h option with the GUI.

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If you add, change, or remove files from the /var/pcp/config/pcp-ise directory, you must restart pcp-ise with the following command:

# /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcp-ise restart 

If you change your Web configuration in any of the following ways, you must reinstall the weblog Performance Metrics Domain Agent (PMDA) and restart the pcp-ise package:

To reinstall weblog and restart pcp-ise, enter the following (in the bash(1) shell):

# cd /var/pcp/pmdas/weblog
# export QUIET_INSTALL=Y
# ./Install
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcp-ise restart

The performance reports produced by PCP for ISE are configured to work "out of the box", with no user setup normally required. However, you can also use PCP interactively to examine the performance of your Web serving environment in real-time.

You can use PCP interactively by remotely logging in to the SGI Internet Server and displaying back the monitoring information to your remote workstation, as shown in Figure 4-2.

Figure 4-2. Real-Time and Remote Display

For more information about using PCP interactively, see the documentation listed in “For More Information about PCP”.

You may want to install the pcp, pcp-ise, and pcp-pro packages on a workstation in addition to the SGI Internet Server. Doing so will result in better display performance, especially if the workstation has hardware accelerated graphics. Figure 4-3 shows this deployment.

Figure 4-3. Real-Time and Remote PCP Installation

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Note: PCP also requires that the XFree Virtual Framebuffer Server (XFree-xvfb*.rpm) is installed on the workstation; XFree is provided with most base Linux distributions.

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To install the required packages on a Linux workstation, do the following:

After the RPMs are installed, the PCP daemons will start automatically on each reboot.

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Note: To manually start the PCP daemons, enter the following: # /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcp start # /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcp-ise start

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To monitor other performance metrics, you can use live-mode PCP tools such as pmchart(1) and pmgsys(1). For the Web-centric setup, weblogvis(1) and webvis(1) provide 3D visualizations of server resource utilization and Web server activity.

You can use the configuration file for pmchart to display the same information as shown on the Web page; you can also use it to monitor the metrics at a different sampling rate or do live monitoring. Use the following command:

$ pmchart -c ISE

The PCP monitoring tools that use a 3D display (mpvis, dkvis, osvis, webvis, and weblogvis) will work best if there is a 16 bpp or better visual available. An 8 bpp visual will still work, but some annoying colormap flashing may occur. You can use the xdpyinfo tool to determine what visuals are available.