pmlogger.control(5) — Linux manual page

NAME | DESCRIPTION | SCHEDULED EXECUTION | FILES | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PMLOGGER.CONTROL(5)        File Formats Manual       PMLOGGER.CONTROL(5)

NAME         top

       pmlogger.control - control files for Performance Co-Pilot
       archiving

DESCRIPTION         top

       Historical archiving of performance data for Performance Co-Pilot
       (see PCPIntro(1)) uses pmlogger(1) and one or more instances of
       pmlogger may be managed by pmlogger_check(1) and
       pmlogger_daily(1).

       pmlogger_check(1) may be run at any time of the day and is
       intended to check that the desired set of pmlogger processes are
       running.  If not, it (re-)starts any missing logger processes.
       By default, pmlogger_check(1) also calls pmlogger_daily(1) with a
       -K option to execute any required archive compression tasks.

       pmlogger_daily(1) is intended to be run once per day, preferably
       in the early morning, as soon after midnight as practicable.  Its
       task is to aggregate, rotate and perform general housekeeping for
       one or more sets of PCP archives.

       Both pmlogger_check(1) and pmlogger_daily(1) operate on a family
       of shared control files, namely the $PCP_PMLOGGERCONTROL_PATH
       file and files within the $PCP_PMLOGGERCONTROL_PATH.d directory.
       These files must not be writable by any user other than root.

       The control file(s) should be customized according to the
       following rules that define for the current version (1.1) of the
       control file format.

       1.  Lines beginning with a ``#'' are comments.  A special case is
           lines beginning ``#!#''; these are control lines for a
           pmlogger that has been stopped using pmlogctl(1).
       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
           scripts, e.g.
               $ PMCD_CONNECT_TIMEOUT=20
           If the value to the right of the ``='' contains any white
           space, then the value should be enclosed in double (") or
           single (') quotes.
       3.  There must be a version line in the control file of the form:
               $version=1.1
       4.  Fields within a line of the control file(s) are usually
           separated by one or more spaces or tabs (although refer to
           the description of the directory field below for some
           important exceptions).
       5.  There should be one line in the control file(s) for each
           pmlogger instance with at least 4 fields of the form:
               host primary socks directory args ...
       6.  The host field is the name of the host that is the source of
           the performance metrics for this pmlogger instance.  The
           reserved word LOCALHOSTNAME will be replaced by the name of
           the local host.
       7.  The primary field indicates if this is a primary pmlogger
           instance (y) or not (n).  Since the primary logger must run
           on the local host, and there may be at most one primary
           logger for a particular host, this field can be y for at most
           one pmlogger instance, in which case the host name must be
           the name of the local host (or LOCALHOSTNAME).
       8.  The socks field indicates if this pmlogger instance needs to
           be started under the control of pmsocks(1) to connect to a
           pmcd(1) through a firewall (y or n).
       9.  The directory field is a directory name.  All archive files
           associated with this pmlogger instance will be created in
           this directory, and this will be the current directory for
           the execution of any programs required to maintain those
           archives.  A useful convention is that primary logger
           archives for the local host with hostname myhost are
           maintained in the directory $PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/myhost (this is
           where the default pmlogger start-up script in $PCP_RC_DIR/pcp
           will create the archives), while archives for the remote host
           mumble are maintained in $PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/mumble.
       10. The directory field may contain embedded shell syntax that
           will be evaluated by sh(1) to produce the real directory name
           to be used.  The allowed constructs are:
           • Any text (including white space) enclosed with $( and )
             will be interpreted as a shell command.
           • Any text (including white space) enclosed with ` and `
             (back quotes) will be interpreted as a shell command.
           • Within a single line only one style of embedded shell
             command is allowed, so either $(...)  or `...`, but not
             both.
           • An initial double quote (") followed by arbitrary text
             (including white space, but excluding an embedded double
             quote) and a final double quote.
           • An initial single quote (') followed by arbitrary text
             (including white space, but excluding an embedded single
             quote) and a final single quote.
           • Any word containing a $ (assumed to introduce an
             environment variable name).
       11. In the directory field, the reserved word LOCALHOSTNAME will
           be replaced by the name of the local host.
       12. The optional args field and any remaining fields are
           interpreted as arguments to be passed to pmlogger(1).  Most
           typically this would be at least the -c option to specify the
           metrics to be logged and the logging frequencies.

       The following sample control lines specify a primary logger on
       the local host (bozo), and non-primary loggers to collect and log
       performance metrics from the hosts wobbly, boing and the local
       host (i.e. bozo).

       $version=1.1
       bozo          y  n  $PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/bozo   -c config.default
       wobbly        n  n  "/store/wobbly/$(date +%Y)"  -c ./wobbly.config
       boing         n  n  $PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/boing   -c ./pmlogger.config
       LOCALHOSTNAME n  n /cluster/LOCALHOSTNAME   -c ./precious.config

SCHEDULED EXECUTION         top

       The periodic execution of pmlogger_check(1) and pmlogger_daily(1)
       is controlled by either systemd(1) or cron(8).

       Typical crontab(5) entries are provided in
       $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmlogger/crontab (unless installed by default in
       /etc/cron.d already) and shown below.

       # daily processing of archives
       14      0       *       *       *       $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmlogger_daily
       # every 30 minutes, check pmlogger instances are running
       25,55   *       *       *       *       $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmlogger_check

       When using systemd(1) on Linux, no crontab entries are needed as
       the timer mechanism provided by systemd is used instead to
       achieve the same period execution as the crontab example above.

FILES         top

       $PCP_PMLOGGERCONTROL_PATH
            the PCP logger control file.  For a new installation this
            file contains no pmlogger(1) control lines (the real control
            files are all in the $PCP_PMLOGGERCONTROL_PATH.d directory),
            but this file is still processed to support any legacy
            configurations therein from earlier PCP releases.
            Warning: this file must not be writable by any user other
            than root.

       $PCP_PMLOGGERCONTROL_PATH.d
            optional directory containing additional PCP logger control
            files, with one or more per pmlogger specification per file.
            Warning: the files herein must not be writable by any user
            other than root.

       $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmlogger/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 ENVIRONMENT         top

       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         top

       PCPIntro(1), pmcd(1), pmlogctl(1), pmlogger(1),
       pmlogger_check(1), pmlogger_daily(1), pmlogger_daily_report(1),
       pmsocks(1), systemd(1) and cron(8).

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the PCP (Performance Co-Pilot) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.pcp.io/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual
       page, send it to [email protected].  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/performancecopilot/pcp.git⟩ on 2024-06-14.
       (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found
       in the repository was 2024-06-14.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       [email protected]

Performance Co-Pilot               PCP               PMLOGGER.CONTROL(5)

Pages that refer to this page: pmlogger_check(1)pmlogger_daily(1)