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5.3. Performing Minimal PCP Setup to Gather File System Data

The following procedure provides instructions on how to install a minimal PCP setup to collect statistics on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The minimal setup involves adding the minimum number of packages on a production system needed to gather data for further analysis.
The resulting tar.gz archive of the pmlogger output can be analyzed by using various PCP tools, such as PCP Charts, and compared with other sources of performance information.
  1. Install the pcp package:
    # yum install pcp
  2. Start the pmcd service:
    # systemctl start pmcd.service
  3. Run the pmlogconf utility to update the pmlogger configuration and enable the XFS information, XFS data, and log I/O traffic groups:
    # pmlogconf -r /var/lib/pcp/config/pmlogger/config.default
  4. Start the pmlogger service:
    # systemctl start pmlogger.service
  5. Perform operations on the XFS file system.
  6. Stop the pmlogger service:
    # systemctl stop pmcd.service
    # systemctl stop pmlogger.service
  7. Collect the output and save it to a tar.gz file named based on the hostname and the current date and time:
    # cd /var/log/pcp/pmlogger/
    # tar -czf $(hostname).$(date +%F-%Hh%M).pcp.tar.gz $(hostname)