pmdashping(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | INSTALLATION | FILES | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PMDASHPING(1)            General Commands Manual           PMDASHPING(1)

NAME         top

       pmdashping - "shell-ping" performance metrics domain agent

SYNOPSIS         top

       $PCP_PMDAS_DIR/shping/pmdashping [-C] [-d domain] [-l logfile]
       [-I interval] [-t timeout] [-U username] configfile

DESCRIPTION         top

       pmdashping is a Performance Metrics Domain Agent (PMDA) which
       exports quality of service and response time measurements for
       arbitrary commands as might be run from a shell such as sh(1).

       These measurements are intended to be used to quantify service
       quality and service availability for those services that are
       either mission critical or act as early indicators of adverse
       system performance.

       The sample configuration monitors simple shell commands (exit and
       date(1)), a short computationally intensive task using sum(1), a
       short C compilation, DNS lookup via nslookup(1), YP lookup via
       ypcat(1), bind/portmapper service using rpcbind(1), SMTP by
       connecting to telnet port 25 and sending an ``expn root''
       request, and NNTP by connecting to telnet port 119 and running a
       ``listgroup'' command.

       It is expected that other commands would follow the examples in
       the sample configuration file, and most deployments of the
       pmdashping PMDA are expected to use a customized configuration
       file.

       A brief description of the pmdashping command line options
       follows:

       -C   Parse configfile, reporting any errors and exiting with non-
            zero status if the file contains syntactical errors.

       -d   It is absolutely crucial that the performance metrics domain
            number specified here is unique and consistent.  That is,
            domain should be different for every PMDA on the one host,
            and the same domain number should be used for the same PMDA
            on all hosts.

       -l   Location of the log file.  By default, a log file named
            shping.log is written in the current directory of pmcd(1)
            when pmdashping is started, i.e.  $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmcd.  If the
            log file cannot be created or is not writable, output is
            written to the standard error instead.

       -I   Amount of time (in seconds) between subsequent executions of
            the list of commands provided via the configuration file
            configfile.  The default is 2 minutes.

       -t   Amount of time (in seconds) to wait before timing out
            awaiting a response for a command from configfile.  The
            default is 20 seconds.

       -U   User account under which to run the agent and all commands.
            The default is the unprivileged "pcp" account in current
            versions of PCP, but in older versions the superuser account
            ("root") was used by default.

       The required configfile specifies ``tag'' and ``command'' pairs,
       each on a separate line.  All of the commands are run one after
       another, with the whole group rescheduled to be run once per
       interval.  For each command that is run, pmdashping records
       information related to the success (or timeout), exit status,
       elapsed time and CPU time (system and user), and this information
       is exported by the PMDA.  The tags are used to identify the
       individual commands amongst the values exported by the PMDA, and
       form the external instance domain identifiers for the pmdashping
       metrics which relate to each command.

INSTALLATION         top

       In order for a host to export the names, help text and values for
       the shping performance metrics, do the following as root:

            # cd $PCP_PMDAS_DIR/shping
            # ./Install

       The set of ``tag'' and ``command'' pairs may be specified from a
       default (sample) configuration file, a customized file or entered
       interactively as part of the Install script.

       If you want to undo the installation, do the following as root:

            # cd $PCP_PMDAS_DIR/shping
            # ./Remove

       pmdashping is launched by pmcd(1) and should never be executed
       directly.  The Install and Remove scripts notify pmcd(1) when the
       agent is installed or removed.

FILES         top

       $PCP_PMCDCONF_PATH
              command line options used to launch pmdashping
       $PCP_PMDAS_DIR/shping/help
              default help text file for the shping metrics
       $PCP_PMDAS_DIR/shping/sample.conf
              example configuration file with a number of common
              commands
       $PCP_PMDAS_DIR/shping/Install
              installation script for the pmdashping agent
       $PCP_PMDAS_DIR/shping/Remove
              undo installation script for pmdashping
       $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmcd/shping.log
              default log file for error messages and other information
              from pmdashping

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) and pcp-shping(1).

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                     PMDASHPING(1)

Pages that refer to this page: autofsd-probe(1)pcp-shping(1)telnet-probe(1)