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Appendix A. GFS2 Performance Analysis with Performance Co-Pilot
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 supports Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) with GFS2 performance metrics. This allows you to monitor the performance of a GFS2 file system. This appendix describes the GFS2 performance metrics and how to use them.
A.1. Overview of Performance Co-Pilot
Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) is a open source toolkit for monitoring, visualizing, recording, and controlling the status, activities and performance of computers, applications and servers. PCP allows the monitoring and management of both real-time data and the logging and retrieval of historical data. Historical data can be used to analyze any patterns with issues by comparing live results over the archived data.
PCP is designed with a client-server architecture. The PCP collector service is the Performance Metric Collector Daemon (PMCD), which can be installed and run on a server. Once it is started, PCMD begins collecting performance data from the installed Performance Metric Domain Agents (PMDAs). PMDAs can be individually loaded or unloaded on the system and are controlled by the PMCD on the same host. The GFS2 PMDA, which is part of the default PCP installation, is used. to gather performance metric data of GFS2 file systems in PCP.
Table A.1, “PCP Tools” provides a brief list of some PCP tools in the PCP Toolkit that this chapter describes. For information about additional PCP tools, see the
PCPIntro(1) man page and the additional PCP man pages.
Table A.1. PCP Tools
| Tool | Use |
|---|---|
pmcd | Performance Metric Collector Service: collects the metric data from the PMDA and makes the metric data available for the other components in PCP |
pmlogger | Allows the creation of archive logs of performance metric values which may be played back by other PCP tools |
pmproxy | A protocol proxy for pmcd which allows PCP monitoring clients to connect to one or more instances of pmcd by means of pmproxy |
pminfo | Displays information about performance metrics on the command line |
pmstore | Allows the modification of performance metric values (re-initialize counters or assign new values) |
pmdumptext | Exports performance metric data either live or from performance archives to an ASCII table |
pmchart | Graphical utility that plots performance metric values into charts (pcp-gui package) |
