|
HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
|
|
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CONFIGURATION | FILES | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
|
|
|
PMIE_CHECK(1) General Commands Manual PMIE_CHECK(1)
pmie_check, pmie_daily - administration of the Performance Co-
Pilot inference engine
$PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check [-CNPpsTV?] [-c control] [-l logfile]
$PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_daily [-NV?] [-c control] [-k discard] [-l
logfile] [-m addresses] [-x compress] [-X program] [-Y regex]
This series of shell scripts and associated control files may be
used to create a customized regime of administration and
management for the Performance Co-Pilot (see PCPIntro(1))
inference engine, pmie(1).
pmie_check may be run at any time of the day and verifies that a
desired set of pmie processes is running. If not, it (re-)starts
any missing inference engine processes.
pmie_daily is intended to be run once per day, preferably in the
early morning, as soon after midnight as practicable. Its task is
to rotate the log files for the running pmie processes - these
files may grow without bound if the ``print'' action is used, or
any other pmie action writes to its stdout/stderr streams. After
some period, old pmie log files are discarded.
The available command line options are:
-c control, --control=control
Both pmie_check and pmie_daily are controlled by PCP
inference engine control file(s) that specify the pmie
instances to be managed. The default control file is
$PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH but an alternate may be specified using
the -c option. If the directory $PCP_PMLOGGERCONTROL_PATH.d
(or control.d from the -c option) exists, then the contents
of any additional control files therein will be appended to
the main control file (which must exist).
-C This option causes pmie_check to query the system service
runlevel information for pmie, and use that to determine
whether to start processes or not.
-k period, --discard=period
The log retention period is 14 days by default, but this may
be changed using this option. Two special values are
recognized for the discard period, namely 0 to keep no log
files beyond the current one, and forever to prevent any log
files being discarded.
-l file, --logfile=file
In order to ensure that mail is not unintentionally sent when
these scripts are run from cron(8) diagnostics are always
sent to log files. By default, these files are
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/pmie_daily.log and
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/pmie_check.log but this can be changed
using the -l option. If this log file already exists when
the script starts, it will be renamed with a .prev suffix
(overwriting any log file saved earlier) before diagnostics
are generated to the new log file.
-m addresses, --mail=addresses
Use of this option causes pmie_daily to construct a summary
of the log files generated for all monitored hosts in the
last 24 hours (lines matching `` OK '' are culled), and e-
mail that summary to the set of space-separated addresses.
-N, --showme
This option enables a ``show me'' mode, where the programs
actions are echoed, but not executed, in the style of ``make
-n''. Using -N in conjunction with -V maximizes the
diagnostic capabilities for debugging.
-s, --stop
Use of this option provides the reverse pmie_check
functionality, allowing the set of pmie processes to be
cleanly shutdown.
-p, --skip-primary
If this option is specified for pmie_check then any line from
the control files for the primary pmie will be ignored. This
option is intended for environments where some system daemon,
like systemd(1), is responsible for controlling (starting,
stopping, restarting, etc.) the primary pmie.
-P, --only-primary
If this option is specified for pmie_check then only the
primary pmie entry in the control files will be processed.
This is the logical opposite of the -p option described above
and is intended for use by RC scripts that start only the
primary pmie, such as the pmie.service unit. The -p and -P
options to pmie_check are mutually exclusive.
-T, --terse
This option to pmie_check produces less verbose output than
the default. This is most suitable for a pmie ``farm'' where
many instances of pmie are expected to be running.
-V, --verbose
The output from the cron execution of the scripts may be
extended using the -V option to the scripts which will enable
verbose tracing of their activity. By default the scripts
generate no output unless some error or warning condition is
encountered. Using -N in conjunction with -V maximizes the
diagnostic capabilities for debugging.
-x period, --compress-after=period
Log files can optionally be compressed after some period to
conserve disk space. This is particularly useful for large
numbers of pmie processes under the control of pmie_check.
The -x option specifies the number of days after which to
compress archive data files.
-X program, --compressor=program
This option specifies the program to use for compression - by
default this is xz(1).
-Y regex, --regex=regex
This option allows a regular expression to be specified
causing files in the set of files matched for compression to
be omitted - this allows only the data file to be compressed,
and also prevents the program from attempting to compress it
more than once. The default regex is
"\.(meta|index|Z|gz|bz2|zip|xz|lzma|lzo|lz4|zst)$"
- such files are filtered using the -v option to egrep(1).
-?, --help
Display usage message and exit.
Warning: The $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH and $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH.d
files must not be writable by any user other than root.
The control file(s) should be customized according to the
following rules that define for the current version (1.1) of the
control file format.
1. Lines beginning with a ``#'' are comments.
2. Lines beginning with a ``$'' are assumed to be assignments to
environment variables in the style of sh(1), and all text
following the ``$'' will be eval'ed by the script reading the
control file, and the corresponding variable exported into the
environment. This is particularly useful to set and export
variables into the environment of the administrative script,
e.g.
$ PMCD_CONNECT_TIMEOUT=20
3. There must be a version line in the initial control file of
the form:
$ version=1.1
4. There should be one line in the control file(s) for each pmie
instance of the form:
host y|n y|n logfile args
5. Fields within a line of the control file(s) are separated by
one or more spaces or tabs.
6. The first field is the name of the host that is the default
source of the performance metrics for this pmie instance.
7. The second field indicates if this is a primary pmie instance
(y) or not (n). Since the primary inference engine must run
on the local host, and there may be at most one primary for a
particular host, this field can be y for at most one pmie
instance, in which case the host name must be the name of the
local host. When generating pmie configuration files, the
primary clause indicates that pmieconf(1) should enable all
rules in the primary group, in addition to all other default
rules.
8. The third field indicates whether this pmie instance needs to
be started under the control of pmsocks(1) to connect to a
pmcd through a firewall (y or n).
9. The fourth field is the name of the pmie activity log file. A
useful convention is that pmie instances monitoring the local
host with hostname myhost are maintained in the directory
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/myhost, while activity logs for the remote
host mumble are maintained in $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/mumble. This
is consistent with the way pmlogger(1) maintains its activity
logs and archive files.
10. All other fields are interpreted as arguments to be passed to
pmie(1). Most typically this would be the -c option.
The following sample control lines specify one pmie instance
monitoring the local host (wobbly), and another monitoring
performance metrics from the host splat.
wobbly n PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/wobbly -c config.default
splat n PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/splat -c splat/cpu.conf
Typical crontab(5) entries for periodic execution of pmie_daily
and pmie_check are given in $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmie/crontab (unless
installed by default in /etc/cron.d already) and shown below.
# daily processing of pmie logs
08 0 * * * $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_daily
# every 30 minutes, check pmie instances are running
28,58 * * * * $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check
When using systemd(1) on Linux, no crontab entries are needed as
the timer mechanism provided by systemd is used instead.
The pmiectl(1) utility may invoke pmie_check using the sudo(1)
command to run it under the $PCP_USER ``pcp'' account. If sudo is
configured with the non-default requiretty option (see below),
pmie_check may fail to run due to not having a tty configured.
This issue can be resolved by adding a second line (expand
$PCP_BINADM_DIR according to your platform) to the /etc/sudoers
configuration file as follows:
Defaults requiretty
Defaults!$PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check !requiretty
Note that the unprivileged PCP account under which these commands
run uses /sbin/nologin as the shell, so the requiretty option is
ineffective here and safe to disable in this way.
$PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH
the default PCP inference engine control file
Warning: this file must not be writable by any user other
than root.
$PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH.d
optional directory containing additional PCP inference engine
control files, typically one per host
Warning: this files herein must not be writable by any user
other than root.
$PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmie/crontab
sample crontab for automated script execution by $PCP_USER
(or root) - exists only if the platform does not support the
/etc/cron.d mechanism.
$PCP_VAR_DIR/config/pmie/config.default
default pmie configuration file location for a localhost
inference engine, typically generated automatically by
pmieconf(1).
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/pmie_check.log
default location for the pmie_check log file. When run as a
daemon service, if the pmie process failed to start or exited
early, there may be error messages in this file, particularly
if the daemon could not open it's own log file.
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/pmie_daily.log
default location for error messages generated during the
daily pmie service maintenance operations.
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/<hostname>
default directory location for the pmie log file for the host
hostname
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/<hostname>/lock
transient lock file to guarantee mutual exclusion during pmie
administration for the host hostname - if present, can be
safely removed if neither pmie_daily nor pmie_check are
running
$PCP_LOG_DIR/NOTICES
PCP ``notices'' file used by pmie(1) and friends
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).
egrep(1), PCPIntro(1), pmie(1), pmieconf(1), systemd(1), xz(1) and
cron(8).
This page is part of the PCP (Performance Co-Pilot) project.
Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.pcp.io/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual
page, send it to pcp@groups.io. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/performancecopilot/pcp.git⟩ on 2025-08-11.
(At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found
in the repository was 2025-08-11.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Performance Co-Pilot PCP PMIE_CHECK(1)
Pages that refer to this page: pcpintro(1), pmfind_check(1), pmie(1), pmieconf(1), pmiestatus(1)
|
HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
|