On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Mike Mason wrote:
> Here are a few questions that I've been asked lately...
>
> - Do any of the distros include PCP by default?
Suse 7.x does (or used to). Redhat does not. Don't know about others,
> - What tools (proprietary or open source) use PCP's PMAPI for data gathering
> on Linux?
Proprietary: SGI has a large mature suite of 2D and 3D GUI monitoring
tools built over the PMAPI, see http://www.sgi.com/software/co-pilot/
This has been ported to Linux, but you can't buy it without buying
SGI hardware. Exactly the same tools are available for IRIX.
GPL: pcpmon provides a graphical stripchart. I think pcpmon's home page
is http://k332.feld.cvut.cz/~lemming/projects/pcpmon.html
There's other stuff and we'd like to see more GPL tools ported over
to using PCP (e.g. libgtop). Unfortunately, SGI doesn't have the resources
to spend time porting existing tools to use PCP, so it really has to be
a community effort. There have been some great contributions in terms
of bug fixes and new functionality (e.g. new PMDA agents), but not much
in terms of converting existing GPL performance tools.
> - Any idea who's using the open source version of PCP outside of SGI?
>
Well, we seem to get about 30 downloads from oss.sgi.com per week. This
varies a lot, depending on release timeframes, etc. AFAICT, most people
are using the open source PCP tools in scripts for monitoring system
availability and performance, and archive logging for performance audits
and/or capacity planning kinda stuff. Mostly using cmdline tools such
as pmprobe, pminfo and pmie in assorted homebrew scripts, etc., especially
popular with Beowulf style clusters.
> Help with answers would be greatly appreciated.
>
it would be good if others chipped in with their experiences.
-- Mark
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