Installing and using the pcp-zeroconf package for Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)
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 new as of PCP version 3.11.10, and is also included in RHEL 7.4 and later. There is currently 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
- To install it you need to enable the optional repository:
# subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-optional-rpms
- Then you can install it using yum:
# 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 will enable the
pmcd,pmloggerandpmieservices under the control of systemd. The performance data will be captured below/var/log/pcpand the performance data logs will be automatically rolled-over and compressed via the/etc/cron.d/pcp-pmloggercron-job 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
pmloggerservice. -
the captured logs contain sufficient performance metrics to be used by most of the PCP monitoring tools (see references below).
References
- Index of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) articles, solutions, tutorials and white papers
- How do I gather performance data logs to upload to my support case using Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)
- Side-by-side comparison of PCP tools with legacy tools
- How to use a non-default PMDA with PCP?
- How can I run PCP services in a Docker container?
