Chapter 5. Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)

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:

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”.