Re: [pcp] GSOC 2016 idea for PCP

[Charles Cui <charles.cui1984@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Lukas, please see my comments below.

2016-03-07 19:16 GMT-08:00 Lukas Berk <lberk@xxxxxxxxxx>:

Hey Charles,

Charles Cui <charles.cui1984@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Following your advices, I build PCP from source on an Ubuntu system,
> and went through a part of the document. PCP project provides a great
> document, which answers all of my questions in the build. The whole
> process is smooth.

Awesome, glad to hear things worked well. Did you happen to try running
the testsuite?

If I understand correctly, it is tests under the qa folder, right?

I am currently running it, and will post you my results later. Â

> However, I have one specific question about the
> task: I found that PCP agents (pmdas) are domain related. So,
> basically you have different agents for different parts of the system.
> You can have agent for the kernel or agent for the database. My
> question is which agent(s) should I focus during the project? Do you
> have specific targets? I plan to look at the current implementation
> and prepare for possible challenges.

Right. The first step is getting a simple, self contained pmda working.
Check out the src/pmdas/simple directory. There we have a simple pmda
written in C, perl, and python. Each exercising the bindings of
libpcp_pmda in their respective language. This is important for not
only documentation purposes (great sample pmda for beginners learning
about libpcp_pmda), but also for qa purposes (which is highly valued by
the PCP community). Once we've gotten that working in a golang
implementation, we could proceed to working on 'real' golang pmda. Did
you have a specific domain in mind?

Yes, that will work for me by starting with an easier task.Â

I prefer to monitor memcache or database. Sounds good?Â

Cheers,

Lukas