DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / pcp / pcp.1.en
PCP(1) General Commands Manual PCP(1)

pcp, pcp-summary - run a command or summarize an installation

pcp [pcp options...] pcp-command [command options...]
pcp [-LPV?] [-a archive] [-h host] [-O origin] [-n pmnsfile]

The pcp command is used in one of two modes. By default, it summarizes the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) installation on the local host. This mode can also be used to summarize the installation from a remote host, or a historical installation from a set of PCP archives. This mode indirectly invokes the pcp-summary command (in the absence of any other requested command).

Alternatively, a command can be passed to pcp to run, again possibly in the context of a remote host or set of historical archives.

When pcp is invoked with a command to run, it will search for the named command in $PCP_BINADM_DIR and also $HOME/.pcp/bin (these are usually scripts, and are installed with a "pcp-" prefix). This mode of operation allows system performance tools to be implemented using PMAPI(3) services, while still preserving all of their usual command line options. These options are thus (indirectly) augmented with the standard PCP option set, as described in PCPIntro(1).

This provides a convenient mechanism for obtaining retrospective or remote monitoring capabilities while preserving the behaviour of the system tools.

For example, the pcp-free(1) utility can be invoked as follows, for recorded data from host munch:

$ pcp -a $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/munch/20140317 -O 11:35:50am free -m


             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         23960      14554       9406          0        176       2137
-/+ buffers/cache:      12240      11720
Swap         12047          0      12047

A complete list of the available and installed tools is provided along with the pcp(1) usage message, but some examples include: pcp-free(1), pcp-uptime(1) and pcp-numastat(1).

The summary report includes: the OS version, a summary of the hardware inventory, the local timezone, the PCP software version, the state of the pmcd(1) process and associated Performance Metrics Domain Agents (PMDAs), as well as information about any PCP archive loggers (pmlogger(1)) and PCP inference engines (pmie(1)) that are running.

All of the displayed values are performance metric values and further information for each can be obtained using the command: 

$ pminfo -dtT metric

The complete set of metrics required by pcp to produce its output is contained in $PCP_VAR_DIR/config/pmlogconf/tools/pcp-summary.

With no arguments, pcp reports on the local host, however the following options are accepted:

Report the PCP configuration as described in the set of PCP archive logs, archive, which is a comma-separated list of names, each of which may be the base name of an archive or the name of a directory containing one or more archives.
Report the PCP configuration on host rather than the local host.
Use a local context to collect metrics from DSO PMDAs on the local host without PMCD.
Load an alternative Performance Metrics Name Space (PMNS(5)) from the file pmnsfile.
When reporting archived metrics, start reporting at origin within the time window.
Display pmie(1) performance information - counts of rules evaluating to true, false, or indeterminate, as well as the expected rate of rule calculation, for each pmie process running on the default host. Refer to the individual metric help text for full details on these values.
Display version number and exit.
-?, --help
Display usage message and exit.

pcp will terminate with an exit status of 1 if pmcd on the target host could not be reached or the set of archives could not be opened, or 2 for any other error.

$HOME/.pcp/bin
Per-user location for command scripts.
$PCP_BINADM_DIR
System location for installed command scripts.
$PCP_VAR_DIR/config/pmlogconf/tools/pcp-summary
pmlogconf(1) configuration file for collecting all of the metrics required by pcp

Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. The $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(5).

For environment variables affecting PCP tools, see pmGetOptions(3).

PCPIntro(1), pcp-free(1), pcp-numastat(1), pcp-python(1), pcp-uptime(1), pcp-verify(1), pmcd(1), pmie(1), pmlogconf(1), pmlogger(1), pcp.conf(5), pcp.env(5) and PMNS(5).

PCP Performance Co-Pilot