NAME¶

pmwebd - web access to PCP

SYNOPSIS¶

pmwebd [-p port] [-4] [-6] [-t timeout] [-R resdir] [-c number] [-h hostname] [-a archive] [-C] [-P] [-L] [-N] [-G] [-X] [-i min-interval] [-J [-K spec] [-A archivesdir] [-S] [-l logfile] [-U username] [-v] [-?]

DESCRIPTION¶

Note: this command is deprecated, and will be removed in the next major PCP release. The pmproxy(1) command provides equivalent functionality via its time series option.

pmwebd is a network daemon that binds a subset of the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) client API (PMAPI(3)) to RESTful web applications using a subset the PCP REST API (PMWEBAPI(3))asdescribedbelow.

Web clients request a URI with the prefix /pmapi to access the bindings. pmwebd creates PCP contexts as requested by a dynamic pool of remote clients, and maintains them as long as the clients regularly reconnect to request PMAPI operations. Otherwise, PCP contexts are closed after a timeout. Permanent contexts may be requested on the command line.

In addition to the API binding, pmwebd may be optionally configured as a simple HTTP file server, in order to feed the web application itself to a web browser. URIs not matching the /pmapi prefix are mapped to files under the configured resource directory, if the -R option was given.

In addition, pmwebd may be optionally configured as a server of a subset of the graphite 0.9.12 web API, for URLs with the /graphite prefix, in order to expose PCP archives to interactive data-graphing web applications.

The options to pmwebd are as follows.

-p port

Set the TCP port number on which pmwebd will listen for HTTP requests. The default is 44323.

-4 or -6

Listen only on IPv4 or IPv6. By default, pmwebd will listen on both protocols, if possible.

-A archdir

Limit remote access to archives to only those beneath the given directory. For performance, symbolic links to other directories may not be followed. By default, only files beneath the initial pmwebd working directory may be accessed.

-R resdir

Activate file serving beneath the given resource directory. All regular files there may be read and transcribed to remote clients. By default, file serving is disabled.

-G

Activate servicing of a subset of the graphite webapi. This exposes all PCP archives under the -A directory to remote clients. By default, graphite webapi serving is disabled. To use the graphite and/or grafana web applications included with pmwebd, use both -G and -R, and connect your web browser to http://127.0.0.1:43323/

-X

Disable encoding of common characters for metric names, which allows shorter graphite metric names.

-i min-interval

Set the minimum sampling interval for graphite time series in seconds. The default is 60. Smaller values give higher precision (but not necessarily accuracy) data, but may cost extra processing time at pmwebd or the web browser; and vice versa.

-J

When constructing graphite metric names, use the stored hostname instead of a archive pathname as the first component. This virtually unifies all archives found with the same hostname into a single time series. The host name is canonicalized: any symbol characters other than _ (underscore), space, - (hyphen), and / (slash) are replaced by _ (underscore).

-t timeout

Set the maximum timeout (in seconds) after the last operation on a pmapi web context, before it is closed by pmwebd. A smaller timeout may be requested by the web client. The default is 300.

-c number

Reset the next PMWEBAPI permanent context identifier as given. The default is 1.

-h hostname or -a archive or -L

Assign the next permanent PMWEBAPI context identifier to a PMAPI connection to the given host (with an extended syntax as given in PCPIntro(1)), or archive file, or the PM_CONTEXT_LOCAL.

-C

Mandatory authentication mode, where all host specifications at context creation time must be accompanied by credentials (username and password). These are then passed to pmcd(1) when creating the context. In addition, subsequent PMAPI context operations require matching HTTP Basic authentication credentials. This setting is incompatible with the permissive mode of operation.

-P

Run in permissive mode, allowing Unix domain socket connections and/or local PMDA contexts. By default these are not allowed due to the automatic authentication that is performed on the server in these modes. Only enable this option if you understand the risks involved, and are sure that all remote pmwebd accesses will be from benevolent users. If enabled, unauthenticated remote PMWEBAPI(3) clients will be able to access potentially sensitive performance metric values which an unauthenticated PMAPI(3) client usually would not be able to. Refer to CVE-2012-3419 for additional details.

-N

Disable creation of new PMWEBAPI contexts via HTTP requests, leaving only permanent ones accessible.

-K spec

When fetching metrics from a local context, the -K option may be used to control the DSO PMDAs that should be made accessible. The spec argument conforms to the syntax described in pmSpecLocalPMDA(3). More than one -K option may be used.

-l logfile

By default, logging goes to standard output/error file handles. The verbosity flag -v affects the amount of traffic. The -l option causes the log file to be written to logfile instead. If the log file cannot be created or is not writable, output is written to the standard error instead.

-U username

If invoked as root, assume the identity of username before starting to accept incoming requests from web clients.

-S

Disable service advertisement. By default, pmwebd will advertise its presence on the network using any available mechanisms (such as Avahi/DNS-SD), assisting remote monitoring tools with finding it. These mechanisms are disabled with this option.

-v

Increase the verbosity of pmwebd as it logs to its standard output/error.

-?

Show pmwebd invocation help and exit.

CONTEXT CREATION: pmNewContext¶

To create a new web context identifier, a web client invokes:

/pmapi/context?hostname=STRING

/pmapi/context?hostspec=STRING

Creates a PM_CONTEXT_HOST PMAPI context with the given host name and/or extended specification. If the host specification contains a userid/password combination, then the corresponding PMAPI context operations will require HTTP Basic authentication credentials with matching userid/password.

In addition, the web client may add the parameter &polltimeout=MMMM for a maximum interval (in seconds) between expected accesses to the given context. This value is limited by pmwebd configuration, and is a courtesy to allow pmwebd to free up memory earlier in case of sudden web application shutdown.

If successful, the response from these requests is a JSON document of the form:

{ "context" : NNNNN }

The number (a 32-bit unsigned decimal) is then used in all later operations.

CONTEXT CREATION: configurable permanent contexts¶

In addition, permanent contexts may be created by pmwebd at initialization using its -h, -a, -L command line options, so that a set of fixed NNNNN numbers may be made available to web clients.

PMAPI OPERATIONS¶

The general form of the requests is as follows: /pmapi/NNNNN/OPERATION where

/pmapi

is the fixed prefix for all PMWEBAPI operations,

NNNNN

is a PMWEBAPI context number returned from a context-creation call, or assigned permanently at pmwebd startup, and

OPERATION?PARAM1=VALUE2&PARAM2=VALUE2

identifies the operation and its URL-encoded parameters. Some parameters may be optional.

{ "metrics": [ 


    { "name":"foo.bar", "pmID":PPPP, "indom":DDDD,


      "type":"32", "sem":"instant", "units":"MHz",


      "text-oneline":"foo bar", "text-help":"blah blah blah" },


    { "name":"foo.bar2", ... }


    ...


  ] }

{ "timestamp": { "s":SEC, "us":USEC },


  "values": [


        { "pmid":PPPP1, "name":"NAME1",


          "instances:" [


               { "instance":IIII1, "value":VALUE1 }


               { "instance":IIII2, "value":VALUE2 }


               ...


          ] },


        { "pmid":PPPP2, "name":"NAME2", ... }


        ...


  ] }

{ "indom":DDDD,


   "instances": [


      { "instance":IIII, "name":"INAME" }


      ...


   ] }

{ "success" : true }

# PCP proc.nprocs instant none
# HELP proc:nprocs instantaneous number of processes
# TYPE proc:nprocs gauge
proc:nprocs 7
# PCP kernel.pernode.cpu.intr counter millisec
# HELP kernel:pernode:cpu:intr_seconds_total total interrupt CPU time from /proc/stat for each node
# TYPE kernel:pernode:cpu:intr_seconds_total counter
kernel:pernode:cpu:intr_seconds_total{instance="node0"} 25603.540000000001
# PCP filesys.blocksize instant byte
# HELP filesys:blocksize_bytes Size of each block on mounted filesystem (Bytes)
# TYPE filesys:blocksize_bytes gauge
filesys:blocksize_bytes{instance="/dev/mapper/docker-253:0-83713-\
9a130460b46163fcf4443710db3159dea6bb5ec2aaca108515839a7a28c191ce"} 4096
filesys:blocksize_bytes{instance="/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-root17"} 4096

GRAPHITE¶

When enabled, pmwebd can emulate a subset of the graphite web-api to allow web applications like graphite and grafana to extract data from all archives under the configured -A directory. The graphite namespace is constructed from the PCP archives using a simple mapping that encodes the Cartesian product of archives, metrics, and instance-domain instances into dot-separated strings. Some metacharacter-quoting is employed to encode general strings into components. Only numeric PCP metrics are exposed; COUNTER semantic values are rate-converted.

Since glob wildcarding is supported within metric name components, using them in the first component (an encoding of the archive name) is a good way to identify machines, or to match multiple archives spanning times of interest.

We list here only the broadest outline of the supported calls. pmwebd does not support every graphite web-api option, so many querystring parameters may be ignored. Arithmetic/statistical functions on metrics are not supported.

/graphite/render?format=json&target=FOO&from=TIME&until=TIME

Return a series of values of the given metrics, between the two times, sampled every 60 seconds.

/graphite/rawdata?target=FOO.BAR&from=TIME&until=TIME

Same, with a slightly different result encoding.

/graphite/render?format=png&target=FOO&from=TIME&until=TIME&....

Same, but render the curves into a PNG image file. Several color- and rendering-control-related parameters are supported.

/graphite/metrics/find?query=FOO.BAR.*

Provide incremental metric-tree traversal using wildcards.

/graphite/graphlot/findmetric?query=FOO+BAR

Search through metrics with space-separated regular expressions.

/graphite/browser/search?q=FOO+BAR

Same, with a slightly different result encoding.

SECURITY¶

pmwebd is suitable for direct exposure to trusted networks only, due to several security limitations. Most or all of these limitations may be worked around by use of a web application firewall (for example, an Apache HTTP proxy), which would add the constraints and capabilities absent within pmwebd. Such configuration is beyond the scope of this document.

encryption/confidentiality

pmwebd does not currently support HTTPS (SSL/TLS), so the HTTP traffic is not protected against network-level attacks.

authentication

The PMAPI layer does not possess a mandatory authentication mechanism, so any remote connection can access any metric exposed by suchly connected PMAPI contexts. However, a new host-context string may use authentication clauses of the longer host URLs, for example pcps://hostname?method=plain&user=userid&pass=password. Use of resulting pmwebapi contexts later requires matching HTTP PLAIN authentication; see below.

inbound admission control

pmwebd does not impose access control on the origin or rate of its incoming requests. It may be possible for some clients to starve others.

outbound admission control

pmwebd does not impose access control on outbound connections when a new PMAPI context is created for a PMCD. (Without the -P option, connections to UNIX-domain / local PMCDs are blocked.) This enables hypothetical use of a pmwebd instance to be used as a network proxy/scanner. For an archive type context, the files must be located under the pmwebd current directory, or another directory specified by -A. One may entirely disable remotely specified PMAPI context creation using the -N option; in this case, specify a static set of contexts using the -h, -a, and/or -L options. You may assign them arbitrary context numbers with the -c option.

context ownership

Authenticated PCP contexts are protected by requiring the same HTTP PLAIN/simple userid/password credentials for related /pmapi requests. However, unauthenticated contexts for different web clients are kept distinct only by the assignment of large pseudorandom identifiers. It may be possible to find these by brute-force search or other techniques, thereby letting a web client impersonate another. For more privacy of the permanent contexts, use the -c option to reset their starting web context identifiers to a number much different from 1. On the other hand, context ownership is not that precious, since there exist no state-destructive operations for them, except perhaps metric store or instance profile settings.

STARTING AND STOPPING PMWEBD¶

The pmwebd server may be started automatically at boot time and stopped when the system is being brought down. Users may also run customized pmwebd instances (under separate -p PORT numbers), for example for their own archive farms. For management fo the system pmwebd, become superuser and type

# $PCP_RC_DIR/pmwebd start

to start pmwebd, or

# $PCP_RC_DIR/pmwebd stop

to stop pmwebd. Starting pmwebd when it is already running is the same as stopping it and then starting it again.

FILES¶

$PCP_PMWEBDOPTIONS_PATH

command line options and environment variable settings for pmwebd when launched from $PCP_RC_DIR/pmwebd This file is interpreted as a Bourne Shell script, expecting variable settings of the form "OPTIONS=value" and possibly others.

$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmwebd/pmwebd.log

Log file for system pmwebd service.

$PCP_LOG_DIR

Default directory for -A option: a base directory containing PCP archives.

$PCP_SHARE_DIR/webapps

Default directory for -R option: a base directory containing web applications.

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¶

PCPIntro(1), PCPIntro(3), PMAPI(3), PMWEBAPI(3), pmSpecLocalPMDA(3), pcp.conf(5), pcp.env(5) http://graphite.readthedocs.org/ and pmns(5).