Qn on supporting metrics from multiple hosts in pmstat, pmchart and pmie tools

[Jun Wang <junwang123@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi PCP Folks,

Being a newbie on PCP, I have questions on monitoring metrics from multiple collector hosts. On the monitoring side, with tools like pmchart, pmie and pmstat, what's the strategy to monitor metrics from multiple collector nodes?  To my understanding, each pmcd, together with the corresponding pmdas, runs and manages one collector node.

I'm reading PCP on Linux user's guide on http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/cosmos/private/documentation/SGI/propack/PCP_LinuxUAG/pdf/PCP_LinuxUAG.pdf.

pmstat has an option -H which allows users to specify multiple hosts. I verifies that it does print out stats from multiple hosts, one after the other when hosts are specified with -H.

pmie has an -h option which allow users to specify only one host to monitor. However, it appears that hosts can also be specified in the pmie specification language to create per-host and cross-host rules. Does this implicitly trigger the communication between pmie and the pmcd(s) on the corresponding hosts that are specified in the pmie spec language? On the other hand, there appears to be discussions on starting one pmie, on the monitor side, for each collector host. What's the recommended approach?

pmchart also has an -h option allowing users to specify only one host to monitor. However, there are discussions on hosts in the pmchart man page and it is claimed that pmchart can display metrics from multiple hosts. How do I specify those hosts? Is it available on the menu of the GUI? What's the relation between those hosts and the ONLY host specified with -h option?
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?coll=linux&db=man&fname=/usr/share/catman/man1/pmchart.1.html

Also, if I define a new metrics domain on a collector, a new PMDA and new configuration line(s) in pmcd to enable it, how do I make it available to be selected from pmchart menu? What about multiple metrics domains on multiple collector hosts? Can they be displayed with one pmchart application but multiple views on the monitor side?

Thanks in advance,
Jun