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PCPCompat, pcp-collectl, pmmgr, pmwebd - backward-compatibility in the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)
The Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) is a toolkit designed for monitoring and managing system-level performance. These services are distributed and scalable to accommodate the most complex system configurations and performance problems.
In order to achieve these goals effectively, protocol and on-disk compatibility is provided between different versions of PCP. It is feasible (and indeed encouraged) to use current PCP tools to interrogate any remote, down-rev or up-rev pmcd(1) and also to replay any historical PCP archive (the PCP testsuite includes PCP archives created over 20 years ago!).
From time to time the PCP developers deprecate and remove PCP utilities, replacing them with new versions of utilities providing comparable features. This page describes replacement utilities for historical PCP tools.
PCP provides python(1) interfaces for the PMAPI(3) (Performance Metrics API), the PMDA(3) API (Performance Metrics Domain Agents), the mmv_stats_register(3) API (Memory-Mapped Values) and PCP archive log creation LOGIMPORT(3) API.
With python version 2 reaching end-of-life in 2020 we have deprecated the python version 2 interfaces in PCP (shipped, but no longer supported). In the next major release of PCP (v7) version 2 support will be retired (completely removed). All PCP APIs and python-based tools support python version 3 and have for several years - upgrading is strongly recommended.
PCP provides optional graphical user interfaces built on the cross-platform Qt library, particularly pmchart(1) and pmtime(1).
With Qt v4 reaching end-of-life in 2015 we have removed support for all versions before Qt v5. In addition, some features are missing in early versions of Qt v5 that are now mandatory when building and using PCP Qt tools. As a result the minimum required version of Qt for PCP v6 and beyond is now Qt 5.6.
Versions of PCP before v6 used a combination of both Mozilla NSS (Network Security Services) and OpenSSL for the encryption component of the secure sockets functionality. Starting with PCP v6 this has been simplified into exclusive use of OpenSSL for all use of encryption across PCP. This change affects configuration of optional functionality in pmcd(1) and PMAPI(3) client tools using secure sockets.
The net effect of this change is that encryption is configured in the same ways, using the same certificates, across the HTTPS functionality in pmproxy(1), as well as the encrypted PCP protocol functionality between pmcd, pmproxy and PMAPI client tools. Additionally, the Redis service used by pmseries(1) and pmproxy also exclusively uses OpenSSL, and in a manner similar to PCP, which makes administering these services significantly simpler.
The sar2pcp(1) and iostat2pcp(1) utilities are deprecated, and will be retired in a future version of PCP (v7). This is being replaced by native support for generating PCP archives within the tools of the sysstat package (which provides sar itself, as well as the sadf utility which produces PCP archives via the -l option).
Earlier versions of PCP (prior to v5.1.1) provided a shell script that was used internally by pmlogconf(1), located in the PCP_BINADM_DIR directory, named pmlogconf-setup. This script has been retired. The equivalent functionality remains available in the unlikely event it should be needed via the -s or --setup option to pmlogconf(1).
The version 1 pmlogconf-setup configuration file format (from IRIX) was also retired in this release, after more than 10 years of automatic transition to version 2 format by pmlogconf.
The standalone PCP daemon manager pmmgr has been retired from PCP v5.2.0 onward. It was phased out in favour of the simpler pmfind(1) service for setting up pmie(1) and pmlogger(1) ``farms'' of discovered PCP collector systems with pmfind_check(1). The new mechanisms, especially when integrated with systemd, require no additional daemons and are better integrated with the pmie and pmlogger service management used elsewhere in PCP.
The pcp-collectl utility has been superceded by pmrep(1) from PCP v5 onward.
The equivalent of pcp-collectl subsystem reporting is achieved as follows:
The standalone web applications packaged with older PCP versions have been superceded by grafana-server(1) with the grafana-pcp plugin https://github.com/performancecopilot/grafana-pcp.
This plugin provides an implementation of the Vector application, as well as data sources for pmdabpftrace(1) (bpftrace(8) scripts) and pmseries(1) (fast, scalable Redis-based time series analysis).
The pmwebd daemon has been superceded by pmproxy(1) from PCP v5 onward.
By default, pmproxy will now listen on both its original port (44322) and the PCP web API port (44323) when the time series support is built.
pmproxy provides a compatible implementation of the live PMWEBAPI(3) interfaces used traditionally by the Vector web application (see the ``PCP-WEBAPPS'' section). It also provides extensions to the original pmwebd REST APIs (such as derived metrics, namespace lookups and instance domain profiles), support for the HTTPS protocol, and fast, scalable time series querying using the pmseries(1) REST API and redis-server(1).
The partial Graphite API emulation provided by pmwebd has not been re-implemented - applications wishing to use similar services could use the scalable time series REST APIs described on PMWEBAPI(3).
pcp(1), pmcd(1), iostat2pcp(1), sar2pcp(1), pmrep(1), pmfind(1), pmfind_check(1), pmlogconf(1), pmproxy(1), pmseries(1), pmdabpftrace(1), python(1), redis-server(1), grafana-server(1), mmv_stats_register(3), LOGIMPORT(3), PMAPI(3), PMDA(3) and PMWEBAPI(3).
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