pmie_check(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CONFIGURATION | FILES | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PMIE_CHECK(1)            General Commands Manual           PMIE_CHECK(1)

NAME         top

       pmie_check, pmie_daily - administration of the Performance Co-
       Pilot inference engine

SYNOPSIS         top

       $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check [-CNPpsTV?]  [-c control] [-l logfile]
       $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_daily [-NV?]  [-c control] [-k discard] [-l
       logfile] [-m addresses] [-x compress] [-X program] [-Y regex]

DESCRIPTION         top

       This series of shell scripts and associated control files may be
       used to create a customized regime of administration and
       management for the Performance Co-Pilot (see PCPIntro(1))
       inference engine, pmie(1).

       pmie_check may be run at any time of the day and verifies that a
       desired set of pmie processes is running.  If not, it (re-)starts
       any missing inference engine processes.

       pmie_daily is intended to be run once per day, preferably in the
       early morning, as soon after midnight as practicable.  Its task
       is to rotate the log files for the running pmie processes - these
       files may grow without bound if the ``print'' action is used, or
       any other pmie action writes to its stdout/stderr streams.  After
       some period, old pmie log files are discarded.

OPTIONS         top

       The available command line options are:

       -c control, --control=control
            Both pmie_check and pmie_daily are controlled by PCP
            inference engine control file(s) that specify the pmie
            instances to be managed.  The default control file is
            $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH but an alternate may be specified
            using the -c option.  If the directory
            $PCP_PMLOGGERCONTROL_PATH.d (or control.d from the -c
            option) exists, then the contents of any additional control
            files therein will be appended to the main control file
            (which must exist).

       -C   This option causes pmie_check to query the system service
            runlevel information for pmie, and use that to determine
            whether to start processes or not.

       -k period, --discard=period
            The log retention period is 14 days by default, but this may
            be changed using this option.  Two special values are
            recognized for the discard period, namely 0 to keep no log
            files beyond the current one, and forever to prevent any log
            files being discarded.

       -l file, --logfile=file
            In order to ensure that mail is not unintentionally sent
            when these scripts are run from cron(8) diagnostics are
            always sent to log files.  By default, these files are
            $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/pmie_daily.log and
            $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/pmie_check.log but this can be changed
            using the -l option.  If this log file already exists when
            the script starts, it will be renamed with a .prev suffix
            (overwriting any log file saved earlier) before diagnostics
            are generated to the new log file.

       -m addresses, --mail=addresses
            Use of this option causes pmie_daily to construct a summary
            of the log files generated for all monitored hosts in the
            last 24 hours (lines matching `` OK '' are culled), and e-
            mail that summary to the set of space-separated addresses.

       -N, --showme
            This option enables a ``show me'' mode, where the programs
            actions are echoed, but not executed, in the style of ``make
            -n''.  Using -N in conjunction with -V maximizes the
            diagnostic capabilities for debugging.

       -s, --stop
            Use of this option provides the reverse pmie_check
            functionality, allowing the set of pmie processes to be
            cleanly shutdown.

       -p, --skip-primary
            If this option is specified for pmie_check then any line
            from the control files for the primary pmie will be ignored.
            This option is intended for environments where some system
            daemon, like systemd(1), is responsible for controlling
            (starting, stopping, restarting, etc.) the primary pmie.

       -P, --only-primary
            If this option is specified for pmie_check then only the
            primary pmie entry in the control files will be processed.
            This is the logical opposite of the -p option described
            above and is intended for use by RC scripts that start only
            the primary pmie, such as the pmie.service unit.  The -p and
            -P options to pmie_check are mutually exclusive.

       -T, --terse
            This option to pmie_check produces less verbose output than
            the default.  This is most suitable for a pmie ``farm''
            where many instances of pmie are expected to be running.

       -V, --verbose
            The output from the cron execution of the scripts may be
            extended using the -V option to the scripts which will
            enable verbose tracing of their activity.  By default the
            scripts generate no output unless some error or warning
            condition is encountered.  Using -N in conjunction with -V
            maximizes the diagnostic capabilities for debugging.

       -x period, --compress-after=period
            Log files can optionally be compressed after some period to
            conserve disk space.  This is particularly useful for large
            numbers of pmie processes under the control of pmie_check.
            The -x option specifies the number of days after which to
            compress archive data files.

       -X program, --compressor=program
            This option specifies the program to use for compression -
            by default this is xz(1).

       -Y regex, --regex=regex
            This option allows a regular expression to be specified
            causing files in the set of files matched for compression to
            be omitted - this allows only the data file to be
            compressed, and also prevents the program from attempting to
            compress it more than once.  The default regex is
            ".(meta|index|Z|gz|bz2|zip|xz|lzma|lzo|lz4)$" - such files
            are filtered using the -v option to egrep(1).

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

CONFIGURATION         top

       Warning: The $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH and $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH.d
       files must not be writable by any user other than root.

       The control file(s) should be customized according to the
       following rules that define for the current version (1.1) of the
       control file format.

       1.  Lines beginning with a ``#'' are comments.
       2.  Lines beginning with a ``$'' are assumed to be assignments to
           environment variables in the style of sh(1), and all text
           following the ``$'' will be eval'ed by the script reading the
           control file, and the corresponding variable exported into
           the environment.  This is particularly useful to set and
           export variables into the environment of the administrative
           script, e.g.
               $ PMCD_CONNECT_TIMEOUT=20
       3.  There must be a version line in the initial control file of
           the form:
               $ version=1.1
       4.  There should be one line in the control file(s) for each pmie
           instance of the form:

               host y|n y|n logfile args

       5.  Fields within a line of the control file(s) are separated by
           one or more spaces or tabs.
       6.  The first field is the name of the host that is the default
           source of the performance metrics for this pmie instance.
       7.  The second field indicates if this is a primary pmie instance
           (y) or not (n).  Since the primary inference engine must run
           on the local host, and there may be at most one primary for a
           particular host, this field can be y for at most one pmie
           instance, in which case the host name must be the name of the
           local host.  When generating pmie configuration files, the
           primary clause indicates that pmieconf(1) should enable all
           rules in the primary group, in addition to all other default
           rules.
       8.  The third field indicates whether this pmie instance needs to
           be started under the control of pmsocks(1) to connect to a
           pmcd through a firewall (y or n).
       9.  The fourth field is the name of the pmie activity log file.
           A useful convention is that pmie instances monitoring the
           local host with hostname myhost are maintained in the
           directory $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/myhost, while activity logs for
           the remote host mumble are maintained in
           $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/mumble.  This is consistent with the way
           pmlogger(1) maintains its activity logs and archive files.
       10. All other fields are interpreted as arguments to be passed to
           pmie(1).  Most typically this would be the -c option.

       The following sample control lines specify one pmie instance
       monitoring the local host (wobbly), and another monitoring
       performance metrics from the host splat.

       wobbly  n  PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/wobbly  -c config.default
       splat   n  PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/splat   -c splat/cpu.conf

       Typical crontab(5) entries for periodic execution of pmie_daily
       and pmie_check are given in $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmie/crontab (unless
       installed by default in /etc/cron.d already) and shown below.

       # daily processing of pmie logs
       08      0       *       *       *       $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_daily
       # every 30 minutes, check pmie instances are running
       28,58   *       *       *       *       $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check
       When using systemd(1) on Linux, no crontab entries are needed as
       the timer mechanism provided by systemd is used instead.

       The pmiectl(1) utility may invoke pmie_check using the sudo(1)
       command to run it under the $PCP_USER ``pcp'' account.  If sudo
       is configured with the non-default requiretty option (see below),
       pmie_check may fail to run due to not having a tty configured.
       This issue can be resolved by adding a second line (expand
       $PCP_BINADM_DIR according to your platform) to the /etc/sudoers
       configuration file as follows:

            Defaults requiretty
            Defaults!$PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check !requiretty

       Note that the unprivileged PCP account under which these commands
       run uses /sbin/nologin as the shell, so the requiretty option is
       ineffective here and safe to disable in this way.

FILES         top

       $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH
            the default PCP inference engine control file
            Warning: this file must not be writable by any user other
            than root.

       $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH.d
            optional directory containing additional PCP inference
            engine control files, typically one per host
            Warning: this files herein must not be writable by any user
            other than root.

       $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmie/crontab
            sample crontab for automated script execution by $PCP_USER
            (or root) - exists only if the platform does not support the
            /etc/cron.d mechanism.

       $PCP_VAR_DIR/config/pmie/config.default
            default pmie configuration file location for a localhost
            inference engine, typically generated automatically by
            pmieconf(1).

       $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/pmie_check.log
            default location for the pmie_check log file.  When run as a
            daemon service, if the pmie process failed to start or
            exited early, there may be error messages in this file,
            particularly if the daemon could not open it's own log file.

       $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/pmie_daily.log
            default location for error messages generated during the
            daily pmie service maintenance operations.

       $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/<hostname>
            default directory location for the pmie log file for the
            host hostname

       $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/<hostname>/lock
            transient lock file to guarantee mutual exclusion during
            pmie administration for the host hostname - if present, can
            be safely removed if neither pmie_daily nor pmie_check are
            running

       $PCP_LOG_DIR/NOTICES
            PCP ``notices'' file used by pmie(1) and friends

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

       egrep(1), PCPIntro(1), pmie(1), pmieconf(1), systemd(1), xz(1)
       and cron(8).

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                     PMIE_CHECK(1)

Pages that refer to this page: pcpintro(1)pmfind_check(1)pmie(1)pmieconf(1)pmiestatus(1)