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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | NOTES | CAVEATS | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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SAR2PCP(1) General Commands Manual SAR2PCP(1)
sar2pcp - import sar data and create a PCP archive
sar2pcp infile outfile
sar2pcp is intended to read a binary System Activity Reporting
(sar) data file as created by sadc(1) (infile) and translate this
into a Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) archive with the basename
outfile.
However, if infile has the suffix ``.xml'', then it will be
considered already in XML format and sar2pcp will operate directly
on it.
The resultant PCP achive may be used with all the PCP client tools
to graph subsets of the data using pmchart(1), perform data
reduction and reporting, filter with the PCP inference engine
pmie(1), etc.
A series of physical files will be created with the prefix
outfile. These are outfile.0 (the performance data), outfile.meta
(the metadata that describes the performance data) and
outfile.index (a temporal index to improve efficiency of replay
operations for the archive). If any of these files exists
already, then sar2pcp will not overwrite them and will exit with
an error message of the form
_&__pmLogNewFile: ``blah.0'' already exists, not over-written
sar2pcp is a Perl script that uses the PCP::LogImport Perl wrapper
around the PCP libpcp_import library, and as such could be used as
an example to develop new tools to import other types of
performance data and create PCP archives. A Python wrapper module
is also available.
As of sysstat version 12.0.5, sadc(1) has added functionality to
directly write PCP archive files. To produce archive files from
sar run:
$ sadf -l -O pcparchive=ARCHIVE_NAME sar.dat -- -A
When not using the XML input option, sar2pcp requires infile to
have been created by a version of sadc(1) from
http://sebastien.godard.pagesperso-orange.fr/ which includes the
sadf(1) utility to translate infile into an XML stream (any since
version 6); sar2pcp will automatically run sadf(1) and translate
the resultant XML into a PCP archive.
When using binary sadc files it is important to ensure the
installed sadf is compatible with the version of sadc that
originally generated the binary files. Simply assuming a newer
installed version will work is unfortunately far too optimistic,
and nor should one assume that binary data from different
platforms (e.g. different endianness) will work - these issues are
due to limitations in sadc and sadf, and not in sar2pcp itself.
Fortunately, the sadf message indicating that an incompatibility
has been detected is consistent across versions, and is always
prefixed
Invalid system activity file
Using an XML infile has the advantage that the installed version
of sadf is completely bypassed. sar2pcp undertakes to transform
any valid XML produced by any of the different variations of sadf
into a valid PCP archive. Any version of PCP will be able to
interpret the archive files produced by any version of sar2pcp,
and you are also free to move the binary PCP archive between
different platforms, different hardware, even different operating
systems - it Just Works (TM).
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).
pmie(1), pmchart(1), pmlogger(1), pmlogextract(1),
pmlogsummary(1), sadc(1), sadf(1), sar(1), Date::Parse(3pm),
Date::Format(3pm), PCP::LogImport(3pm), XML::TokeParser(3pm) and
LOGIMPORT(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 SAR2PCP(1)
Pages that refer to this page: pcpcompat(1)
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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. |
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