|
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 | INTRODUCTION | PYTHON2 | QT4 | NSS | SAR2PCP, IOSTAT2PCP | PMLOGCONF-SETUP | PMMGR | PCP-COLLECTL | PCP-WEBAPPS | PMWEBD | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
|
|
|
PCPCOMPAT(1) General Commands Manual PCPCOMPAT(1)
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 creation LOGIMPORT(3) API.
With python version 2 reaching end-of-life in 2020 we have now
removed all support for this version (from PCP version 7 and
later). 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 key-value server 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 stand-alone 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 superseded by pmrep(1) from PCP
v5 onward.
The equivalent of pcp-collectl subsystem reporting is achieved as
follows:
pmrep :collectl-sc
Processor subsystem view.
pmrep :collectl-sm
Memory subsystem view.
pmrep :collectl-sd
Aggregate disks view.
pmrep :collectl-sD
Per-disk-device view.
pmrep :collectl-dm-sD
Device mapper view.
pmrep :collectl-sn
Network subsystem view.
The stand-alone web applications packaged with older PCP versions
have been superseded 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, distributed time series
analysis).
The pmwebd daemon has been superseded 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 with a distributed key-value server
such as https://valkey.io/ .
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), grafana-server(1),
mmv_stats_register(3), LOGIMPORT(3), PMAPI(3), PMDA(3) and
PMWEBAPI(3).
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 PCPCOMPAT(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. |
|