NAME¶
pmie_check,
pmie_daily - administration of the Performance
Co-Pilot inference engine
SYNOPSIS¶
$PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check [
-CNsV] [
-c control]
$PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_daily [
-NV] [
-c control] [
-k discard] [
-m addresses] [
-x
compress] [
-X program] [
-Y regex]
DESCRIPTION¶
This series of shell scripts and associated control files may be used to create
a customized regime of administration and management for the Performance
Co-Pilot (see
PCPintro(1)) inference engine,
pmie(1).
pmie_daily is intended to be run once per day, preferably in the early
morning, as soon after midnight as practicable. Its task is to rotate the log
files for the running
pmie processes - these files may grow without
bound if the ``print'' action is used, or any other
pme action writes
to its stdout/stderr streams. After some period, old
pmie log files are
discarded. This period is 14 days by default, but may be changed using the
-k option. Two special values are recognized for the period
(
discard), namely
0 to keep no log files beyond the current one,
and
forever to prevent any log files being discarded.
Log files can optionally be compressed after some period (
compress), to
conserve disk space. This is particularly useful for large numbers of
pmie processes under the control of
pmie_check. The
-x
option specifies the number of days after which to compress archive data
files, and the
-X option specifies the program to use for compression -
by default this is
xz(1). Use of the
-Y option allows a regular
expression to be specified causing files in the set of files matched for
compression to be omitted - this allows only the data file to be compressed,
and also prevents the program from attempting to compress it more than once.
The default
regex is
".(meta|index|Z|gz|bz2|zip|xz|lzma|lzo|lz4)$" - such files are
filtered using the
-v option to
egrep(1).
Use of the
-m option causes
pmie_daily to construct a summary of
the log files generated for all monitored hosts in the last 24 hours (lines
matching `` OK '' are culled), and e-mail that summary to the set of
space-separated
addresses.
pmie_check may be run at any time, and is intended to check that the
desired set of
pmie(1) processes are running, and if not to re-launch
any failed inference engines. Use of the
-s option provides the reverse
functionality, allowing the set of
pmie processes to be cleanly
shutdown. Use of the
-C option queries the system service runlevel
information for
pmie, and uses that to determine whether to start or
stop processes.
Both
pmie_check and
pmie_daily are controlled by a PCP inference
engine control file that specifies the
pmie instances to be managed.
The default control file is
$PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH but an alternate may
be specified using the
-c option.
The control file should be customized according to the following rules.
- 1.
- Lines beginning with a ``#'' are comments.
- 2.
- Lines beginning with a ``$'' are assumed to be assignments to environment
variables in the style of sh(1), and all text following the ``$''
will be eval'ed by the script reading the control file, and the
corresponding variable exported into the environment. This is particularly
useful to set and export variables into the environment of the
administrative script, e.g.
$ PMCD_CONNECT_TIMEOUT=20
Warning: The $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH file must not be writable
by any user other than root.
- 3.
- There should be one line in the control file for each pmie instance
of the form:
host y|n logfile args
- 4.
- Fields within a line of the control file are separated by one or more
spaces or tabs.
- 5.
- The first field is the name of the host that is the default source
of the performance metrics for this pmie instance.
- 6.
- The second field indicates whether this pmie instance needs
to be started under the control of pmsocks(1) to connect to a
pmcd through a firewall (y or n).
- 8.
- The third field is the name of the pmie activity log file. A
useful convention is that pmie instances monitoring the local host
with hostname myhost are maintained in the directory
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/myhost, while activity logs for the remote
host mumble are maintained in
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/mumble. This is consistent with the way
pmlogger(1) maintains its activity logs and archive files.
- 9.
- All other fields are interpreted as arguments to be passed to
pmie(1). Most typically this would be the -c option.
The following sample control lines specify one
pmie instance monitoring
the local host (
wobbly), and another monitoring performance metrics
from the host
splat.
wobbly n PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/wobbly -c config.default
splat n PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/splat -c splat/cpu.conf
Typical
crontab(5) entries for periodic execution of
pmie_daily
and
pmie_check are given in
$PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmie/crontab
(unless installed by default in
/etc/cron.d already) and shown below.
# daily processing of pmie logs
08 0 * * * $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_daily
# every 30 minutes, check pmie instances are running
28,58 * * * * $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check
The output from the
cron(8) execution of the scripts may be extended
using the
-V option to the scripts which will enable verbose tracing of
their activity. By default the scripts generate no output unless some error or
warning condition is encountered.
The
-N option enables a ``show me'' mode, where the actions are echoed,
but not executed, in the style of ``make -n''. Using
-N in conjunction
with
-V maximizes the diagnostic capabilities for debugging.
FILES¶
- $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH
- the default PCP inference engine control file
Warning: this file must not be writable by any user other than
root.
- $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmie/crontab
- sample crontab for automated script execution by $PCP_USER (or root) -
exists only if the platform does not support the /etc/cron.d
mechanism.
- $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmie/config.default
- default pmlogger configuration file location for a localhost
inference engine, typically generated automatically by
pmieconf(1).
- $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/hostname
- default location for the pmie log file for the host hostname
- $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/hostname/lock
- transient lock file to guarantee mutual exclusion during pmie
administration for the host hostname - if present, can be safely
removed if neither pmie_daily nor pmie_check are
running
- $PCP_LOG_DIR/NOTICES
- PCP ``notices'' file used by pmie(1) and friends
PCP ENVIRONMENT¶
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).
SEE ALSO¶
egrep(1),
PCPintro(1),
pmie(1),
pmieconf(1),
xz(1) and
cron(8).