Chapter 5. Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)
5.1. PCP Overview and Resources
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 provides support for Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), a suite of tools, services, and libraries for monitoring, visualizing, storing, and analyzing system-level performance measurements. Its light-weight distributed architecture makes it particularly well-suited for centralized analysis of complex systems. Performance metrics can be added using the Python, Perl, C++, and C interfaces. Analysis tools can use the client APIs (Python, C++, C) directly, and rich web applications can explore all available performance data using a JSON interface.
PCP allows:
- the monitoring and management of real-time data
- the logging and retrieval of historical data
You can use historical data to analyze patterns with issues by comparing live results with archived data.
The Performance Metric Collection Daemon (
pmcd) is responsible for collecting performance data on the host system, and various client tools, such as pminfo or pmstat, can be used to retrieve, display, archive, and process this data on the same host or over the network. The pcp package provides the command-line tools and underlying functionality. The graphical tool requires the pcp-gui package.
For a list of system services and tools that are distributed with PCP, see Table A.1, “System Services Distributed with Performance Co-Pilot in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7” and Table A.2, “Tools Distributed with Performance Co-Pilot in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7”.
Resources
- The manual page named PCPIntro serves as an introduction to Performance Co-Pilot. It provides a list of available tools as well as a description of available configuration options and a list of related manual pages. By default, comprehensive documentation is installed in the
/usr/share/doc/pcp-doc/directory, notably the Performance Co-Pilot User's and Administrator's Guide and Performance Co-Pilot Programmer's Guide. - For information on PCP, see the Index of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) articles, solutions, tutorials and white papers on the Red Hat Customer Portal.
- If you need to determine what PCP tool has the functionality of an older tool you are already familiar with, see the Side-by-side comparison of PCP tools with legacy tools Red Hat Knowledgebase article.
- See the official PCP documentation for an in-depth description of the Performance Co-Pilot and its usage. If you want to start using PCP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux quickly, see the PCP Quick Reference Guide. The official PCP website also contains a list of frequently asked questions.
