Installing and using the pcp-zeroconf package for Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)

Updated -

Installation

  • pcp-zeroconf is intended to simplify the installation and configuration of the most commonly needed PCP features in customer support environments, where we need comprehensive long term logging of system level performance data with minimal overheads. The pcp-zeroconf RPM package installs a minimal set of dependencies for the server side data collection and does not include client tools. The package is part of PCP from version 3.11.10 onwards, and is also included in the normal repos of RHEL 7.4 and later, as well as RHEL 8, 9 and 10. There was no official RHEL6 package.
  • If the system is not registered/subscribed please see: How to register and subscribe a system to the Red Hat Customer Portal using Red Hat Subscription-Manager 
# yum install pcp-zeroconf
  • As the name suggests, that's it - there are no further installation or configurations steps required in order to collect performance data archives. It is important to make sure there is sufficient space on the /var filesystem (or root filesystem if /var is not a submount) for on-going log collection - approximate 5GB will be required on most small servers. On large servers, at least 10GB of space on /var will be used on an on-going basis. By default, PCP archive logs are automatically culled after 14 days - see pmlogger_daily(1) for instructions on changing this if needed.

Services and configuration

  • The post-install scripts enable the pmcd, pmlogger and pmie services under the control of systemd. The performance data are captured below /var/log/pcp and the performance data logs are automatically rolled-over and compressed on a daily basis. If and when required, these logs can be tarred up and attached to a Red Hat customer support case for analysis by Red Hat support engineers.

  • The performance data archive logs captured by pcp-zeroconf include almost all of the Linux kernel metrics for CPU usage, network, filesystem, disk and memory subsystems. In addition, the optional nfs-client, XFS per-device and proc (per-process) PCP agents are enabled by the post-install script and logged by the pmlogger service.

  • The captured logs contain sufficient performance metrics to be used by most of the PCP monitoring tools (see references below).

Note

One can also install the Performance Co-Pilot by simply installing the pcp rpm package but please note the below mentioned differences among these two packages:

  • pcp-zeroconf and pcp package follows different logging interval - 10 sec & 1 min respectively.
  • pcp-zeroconf by default enables the process level logging whereas with the pcp package one has to enable it manually.
  • As the name suggests pcp-zeroconf by default enables the pmcd and pmlogger services whereas with the 'pcp' one has to enable them manually.
  • pcp-zeroconf pulls pcp package as a dependency and make the above listed changes in the overall configuration of Performance Co-Pilot.

So on RHEL systems it is always recommended to install the pcp-zeroconf package instead of pcp.

References

White Papers, Guide Books, Case Studies and Presentations

  • Component
  • pcp

Comments