pmlogconf(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | SETUP GROUP FILES | OPTIONS | EXAMPLE | MIGRATION | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PMLOGCONF(1)             General Commands Manual            PMLOGCONF(1)

NAME         top

       pmlogconf - create/edit a pmlogger configuration file

SYNOPSIS         top

       pmlogconf [-cqrvV?]  [-d groupsdir] [-g grouptag] [-h host] [-s
       groupfile] configfile

DESCRIPTION         top

       pmlogconf may be used to create and modify a generic
       configuration file for the PCP archiver, pmlogger(1).

       If configfile does not exist, pmlogconf will create a generic
       configuration file with a default set of enabled metrics and
       logging intervals.

       Once created, configfile may be used with the -c option to
       pmlogger(1) to select performance metrics and specify logging
       intervals for a PCP archive.

       If configfile does exist, pmlogconf will prompt for input from
       the user to enable or disable groups of related performance
       metrics and to control the logging interval for each enabled
       group.

       Group selection requires a simple y (yes) or n (no) response to
       the prompt Log this group?.

       Other responses at this point may be used to select additional
       control functions as follows:

       m         Report the names of the metrics in the current group.

       q         Finish with group selection (quit) and make no further
                 changes to this group or any subsequent group.

       /pattern  Make no change to this group but search for a group
                 containing pattern in the description of the group or
                 the names of the associated metrics.

       A logging interval is specified by responding to the Logging
       interval?  prompt with the keywords once or default or a valid
       pmlogger(1) interval specification of the form ``every N
       timeunits'' or simply ``N timeunits '' (the every is optional)
       where N is an unsigned integer and timeunits is one of the
       keywords msec, millisecond, sec, second, min, minute, hour or the
       plural form of one of the keywords.

       When run from automated logging setup processes, the -c option is
       used to indicate that pmlogconf is in auto-create mode and no
       interactive dialog takes place.  The output configfile has an
       additional comment message and timestamp indicating this fact, so
       that it can be identified and subsequently updated using -c
       again.  This option is not appropriate for interactive use of the
       tool.

       The -q option suppresses the logging interval dialog and
       preserves the current interval from configfile.

       More verbose output may be enabled with the -v option.

SETUP GROUP FILES         top

       When an initial configfile is created, the default specifications
       come from a set of group files below the groupsdir specified with
       the -d option (the default groupsdir is
       $PCP_VAR_DIR/config/pmlogconf which is most commonly correct, so
       the -d option is rarely used in practice).

       The directory structure below groupsdir is arbitrary as all
       regular files will be found by recursive descent and considered,
       so add-on products and PMDA developers can easily extend the
       available defaults to pmlogconf by adding new directories and/or
       group files below groupsdir.

       These group files are processed in the following ways:

       •  When a new configfile is created, all group files are
          processed.

       •  Whenever pmlogconf is run with an existing configfile,
          groupsdir is traversed to see if any new groups have been
          defined and should be considered for inclusion in configfile.

       •  When pmlogconf processes a group in configfile that is
          enabled, the list of metrics associated with the group is
          taken from the group file (and replaces any previous list of
          metrics associated with this group in configfile).

       •  When either the -r (reprobe) or the -c (auto-create) command
          line option is specified, every group (not just newly
          discovered ones) is reprocessed to see if it should be
          considered for inclusion in configfile.

       •  If a group is found in configfile but the corresponding group
          does not exist below groupsdir (as would be the case when a
          group is made obsolete by a PCP upgrade) then the handling of
          the group depends on the mode in which pmlogconf is being run.
          With -c the corresponding group is culled from configfile,
          otherwise the corresponding group is unchanged in configfile.
          In either case a warning is issued.

       Each group file is structured as follows:

       •  The first line must contain #pmlogconf-setup 2.0

       •  Other lines beginning with # are treated as comments.

       •  Blank lines are ignored.

       •  One or more lines starting with the keyword ident are used to
          provide the human-readable description of the group.

       •  Non-blank lines beginning with white space define metrics to
          be associated with this group, one per line.  Each metric
          specification follows the rules for a pmlogger(1)
          configuration, namely either the name of a non-leaf node in
          the PMNS (implying all descendent names in the PMNS), or the
          name of a leaf node in the PMNS optionally followed by one or
          more instance names enclosed by ``['' and ``]''.

       •  A control line starting with one of the keywords probe or
          force must be present.

       •  An optional logging interval control line begins with the
          keyword delta followed by one of the pmlogger(1) interval
          specification described above.

       •  probe control lines have the format:
                      probe metric [condition [state_rule] ]
          where metric is the name of a PCP metric (must be a leaf node
          in the PMNS, no instance specification is allowed, and it must
          not be a derived metric) and the optional condition is the
          keyword exists (true if metric exists, i.e. is defined in the
          PMNS) or the keyword values (true if metric exists in the PMNS
          and has one or more current values) or an expression of the
          form
                                      op val
          where op is one of the awk(1) operators (==, !=, >, >=, <, <=,
          ~ (regular expression match) or !~ (negated regular expression
          match)) and val is a value (arbitrary sequence of characters,
          excluding a space) and the condition is true if there is some
          instance of metric that makes the expression true.

          If the condition is missing, the default is exists.

          When an explicit condition is provided, there may also be an
          optional state_rule of the form
                            ? true_state : false_state
          where true_state (applies if condition is true) and
          false_state (applies if condition is false) are both taken
          from the keywords include (include and enable the group and
          the associated metrics in configfile), available (include and
          disable the group in configfile - a user action of y as
          described above is needed to enable the group and add the
          associated metrics into configfile) or exclude (the group is
          not considered for inclusion in configfile).

          The default state_rule is
                              ? available : excludeforce control lines begin with the keyword force followed by
          one of the states defined above, so one of the actions
          include, exclude or available is applied unconditionally to
          the group.

       Probing is only done when a new group is being added to
       configfile or when the -r command line option is specified.  The
       evaluation of the probing conditions is done by contacting
       pmcd(1) on hostname (defaults to local:).

OPTIONS         top

       The available command line options are:

       -c   Enable non-interactive, auto-create mode.

       -d groupdir, --groups=groupdir
            Specify the path to the groupsdir directory.

       -g grouptag, --group=grouptag
            Query logging state for the specific logging group named
            grouptag.

       -h host, --host=host
            Performance metrics source is pmcd(1) on host, rather than
            on the default localhost.

       -q, --quiet
            Quiet mode, suppress logging interval dialog.

       -r, --reprobe
            Reconsider every group for inclusion in the configfile.

       -s groupfile, --setup=groupfile
            Report the default logging state for the one logging group
            in groupfile.  This is equivalent output to that produced by
            the retired pmlogconf-setup shell script from earlier
            versions of PCP.

       -v, --verbose
            Enable verbose mode.

       -V, --version
            Display version number and exit.

       -?, --help
            Display usage message and exit.

EXAMPLE         top

       The following group file demonstrates all of the supported
       syntactic elements.

       #pmlogconf-setup 2.0
       ident   Example group file
       ident   ... more description
       delta   1 minute
       probe   sample.secret.foo.one values ? include : exclude
               sample.secret.foo.one
               sample.secret.foo.bar   # non-leaf in the PMNS
               sample.colour [ red green ]

MIGRATION         top

       The current version of pmlogconf (2.0) supports a slightly
       different format for configfile compared to earlier versions.  If
       an old version configfile is presented to pmlogconf it will be
       converted to the new format.

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).

       pmlogconf overrides any $PCP_DERIVED_CONFIG environment variable
       to an empty string, for performance reasons.

       pmlogconf honours the $PMCD_WAIT_TIMEOUT environment variable
       when probing and creating new pmlogger configuration files.  It
       uses a default timeout value of 10 seconds for this, in the
       absence of an environment setting.

SEE ALSO         top

       pmcd(1), pmlogger(1), pcp.conf(5) and pcp.env(5).

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 pcp@groups.io.  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/performancecopilot/pcp.git⟩ on 2023-12-22.
       (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found
       in the repository was 2023-12-16.)  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
       man-pages@man7.org

Performance Co-Pilot               PCP                      PMLOGCONF(1)

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