pmapi(3) — Linux manual page

NAME | C SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | PERFORMANCE METRICS - NAMES AND IDENTIFIERS | PMAPI CONTEXT | INSTANCE DOMAINS | THE TYPE OF METRIC VALUES | THE DIMENSIONALITY AND SCALE OF METRIC VALUES | INSTANCE PROFILE | COLLECTION TIME | GENERAL ISSUES OF PMAPI PROGRAMMING STYLE | DIAGNOSTICS | MULTI-THREADED APPLICATIONS | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PMAPI(3)                Library Functions Manual                PMAPI(3)

NAME         top

       PMAPI - introduction to the Performance Metrics Application
       Programming Interface

C SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <pcp/pmapi.h>

        ... assorted routines ...

       cc ... -lpcp

DESCRIPTION         top

       Within the framework of the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), client
       applications are developed using the Performance Metrics
       Application Programming Interface (PMAPI) that defines a
       procedural interface with services suited to the development of
       applications with a particular interest in performance metrics.

       This description presents an overview of the PMAPI and the
       context in which PMAPI applications are run.  The PMAPI is more
       fully described in the Performance Co-Pilot Programmer's Guide,
       and the manual pages for the individual PMAPI routines.

PERFORMANCE METRICS - NAMES AND IDENTIFIERS         top

       For a description of the Performance Metrics Name Space (PMNS)
       and associated terms and concepts, see PCPIntro(1).

       Not all PMIDs need be represented in the PMNS of every
       application.  For example, an application which monitors disk
       traffic will likely use a name space which references only the
       PMIDs for I/O statistics.

       Applications which use the PMAPI may have independent versions of
       a PMNS, constructed from an initialization file when the
       application starts; see pmLoadASCIINameSpace(3),
       pmLoadNameSpace(3), and PMNS(5).

       Internally (below the PMAPI) the implementation of the
       Performance Metrics Collection System (PMCS) uses only the PMIDs,
       and a PMNS provides an external mapping from a hierarchic
       taxonomy of names to PMIDs that is convenient in the context of a
       particular system or particular use of the PMAPI.  For the
       applications programmer, the routines pmLookupName(3) and
       pmNameID(3) translate between names in a PMNS and PMIDs, and vice
       versa.  The PMNS may be traversed using pmGetChildren(3)
       andpmTraversePMNS.  The pmFetchGroup(3) functions combine metric
       name lookup, fetch, and conversion operations.

PMAPI CONTEXT         top

       An application using the PMAPI may manipulate several concurrent
       contexts, each associated with a source of performance metrics,
       e.g. pmcd(1) on some host, or a set of archives of performance
       metrics as created by pmlogger(1).

       Contexts are identified by a ``handle'', a small integer value
       that is returned when the context is created; see pmNewContext(3)
       and pmDupContext(3).  Some PMAPI functions require an explicit
       ``handle'' to identify the correct context, but more commonly the
       PMAPI function is executed in the ``current'' context.  The
       current context may be discovered using pmWhichContext(3) and
       changed using pmUseContext(3).

       If a PMAPI context has not been explicitly established (or the
       previous current context has been closed using
       pmDestroyContext(3)) then the current PMAPI context is undefined.

       In addition to the source of the performance metrics, the context
       also includes the instance profile and collection time (both
       described below) which controls how much information is returned,
       and when the information was collected.

INSTANCE DOMAINS         top

       When performance metric values are returned across the PMAPI to a
       requesting application, there may be more than one value for a
       particular metric.  Multiple values, or instances, for a single
       metric are typically the result of instrumentation being
       implemented for each instance of a set of similar components or
       services in a system, e.g.  independent counts for each CPU, or
       each process, or each disk, or each system call type, etc.  This
       multiplicity of values is not enumerated in the name space but
       rather, when performance metrics are delivered across the PMAPI
       by pmFetch(3), the format of the result accommodates values for
       one or more instances, with an instance-value pair encoding the
       metric value for a particular instance.

       The instances are identified by an internal identifier assigned
       by the agent responsible for instantiating the values for the
       associated performance metric.  Each instance identifier has a
       corresponding external instance identifier name (an ASCII
       string).  The routines pmGetInDom(3), pmLookupInDom(3) and
       pmNameInDom(3) may be used to enumerate all instance identifiers,
       and to translate between internal and external instance
       identifiers.

       All of the instance identifiers for a particular performance
       metric are collectively known as an instance domain.  Multiple
       performance metrics may share the same instance domain.

       If only one instance is ever available for a particular
       performance metric, the instance identifier in the result from
       pmFetch(3) assumes the special value PM_IN_NULL and may be
       ignored by the application, and only one instance-value pair
       appears in the result for that metric.  Under these
       circumstances, the associated instance domain (as returned via
       pmLookupDesc(3)) is set to PM_INDOM_NULL to indicate that values
       for this metric are singular.

       The difficult issue of transient performance metrics (e.g. per-
       filesystem information, hot-plug replaceable hardware modules,
       etc.) means that repeated requests for the same PMID may return
       different numbers of values, and/or some changes in the
       particular instance identifiers returned.  This means
       applications need to be aware that metric instantiation is
       guaranteed to be valid at the time of collection only.  Similar
       rules apply to the transient semantics of the associated metric
       values.  In general however, it is expected that the bulk of the
       performance metrics will have instantiation semantics that are
       fixed over the execution life-time of any PMAPI client.

THE TYPE OF METRIC VALUES         top

       The PMAPI supports a wide range of format and type encodings for
       the values of performance metrics, namely signed and unsigned
       integers, floating point numbers, 32-bit and 64-bit encodings of
       all of the above, ASCII strings (C-style, NULL byte terminated),
       and arbitrary aggregates of binary data.

       The type field in the pmDesc structure returned by
       pmLookupDesc(3) identifies the format and type of the values for
       a particular performance metric within a particular PMAPI
       context.

       Note that the encoding of values for a particular performance
       metric may be different for different PMAPI contexts, due to
       differences in the underlying implementation for different
       contexts.  However it is expected that the vast majority of
       performance metrics will have consistent value encoding across
       all versions of all implementations, and hence across all PMAPI
       contexts.

       The PMAPI supports routines to automate the handling of the
       various value formats and types, particularly for the common case
       where conversion to a canonical format is desired, see
       pmExtractValue(3) and pmPrintValue(3).

THE DIMENSIONALITY AND SCALE OF METRIC VALUES         top

       Independent of how the value is encoded, the value for a
       performance metric is assumed to be drawn from a set of values
       that can be described in terms of their dimensionality and scale
       by a compact encoding as follows.  The dimensionality is defined
       by a power, or index, in each of 3 orthogonal dimensions, namely
       Space, Time and Count (or Events, which are dimensionless).  For
       example I/O throughput might be represented as Space/Time, while
       the running total of system calls is Count, memory allocation is
       Space and average service time is Time/Count.  In each dimension
       there are a number of common scale values that may be used to
       better encode ranges that might otherwise exhaust the precision
       of a 32-bit value.  This information is encoded in the pmUnits
       structure which is embedded in the pmDesc structure returned from
       pmLookupDesc(3).

       The routine pmConvScale(3) is provided to convert values in
       conjunction with the pmUnits structures that defines the
       dimensionality and scale of the values for a particular
       performance metric as returned from pmFetch(3), and the desired
       dimensionality and scale of the value the PMAPI client wishes to
       manipulate.  Alternatively, the pmFetchGroup(3) functions can
       perform data format and unit conversion operations, specified by
       textual descriptions of desired unit / scales.

INSTANCE PROFILE         top

       The set of instances for performance metrics returned from a
       pmFetch(3) call may be filtered or restricted using an instance
       profile.  There is one instance profile for each PMAPI context
       the application creates, and each instance profile may include
       instances from one or more instance domains.

       The routines pmAddProfile(3) and pmDelProfile(3) may be used to
       dynamically adjust the instance profile.

COLLECTION TIME         top

       For each set of values for performance metrics returned via
       pmFetch(3) there is an associated ``timestamp'' that serves to
       identify when the performance metric values were collected; for
       metrics being delivered from a real-time source (i.e. pmcd(1) on
       some host) this would typically be not long before they were
       exported across the PMAPI, and for metrics being delivered from a
       set of archives, this would be the time when the metrics were
       written into the archive.

       There is an issue here of exactly when individual metrics may
       have been collected, especially given their origin in potentially
       different Performance Metric Domains, and variability in the
       metric updating frequency at the lowest level of the Performance
       Metric Domain.  The PMCS opts for the pragmatic approach, in
       which the PMAPI implementation undertakes to return all of the
       metrics with values accurate as of the timestamp, to the best of
       our ability.  The belief is that the inaccuracy this introduces
       is small, and the additional burden of accurate individual
       timestamping for each returned metric value is neither warranted
       nor practical (from an implementation viewpoint).

       Of course, in the case of collection of metrics from multiple
       hosts the PMAPI client must assume the sanity of the timestamps
       is constrained by the extent to which clock synchronization
       protocols are implemented across the network.

       A PMAPI application may call pmSetMode(3) to vary the requested
       collection time, e.g. to rescan performance metrics values from
       the recent past, or to ``fast-forward'' through a set of
       archives.

GENERAL ISSUES OF PMAPI PROGRAMMING STYLE         top

       Across the PMAPI, all arguments and results involving a ``list of
       something'' are declared to be arrays with an associated argument
       or function value to identify the number of elements in the list.
       This has been done to avoid both the varargs(3) approach and
       sentinel-terminated lists.

       Where the size of a result is known at the time of a call, it is
       the caller's responsibility to allocate (and possibly free) the
       storage, and the called function will assume the result argument
       is of an appropriate size.  Where a result is of variable size
       and that size cannot be known in advance (e.g. for
       pmGetChildren(3), pmGetInDom(3), pmNameInDom(3), pmNameID(3),
       pmLookupLabels(3), pmLookupText(3) and pmFetch(3)) the PMAPI
       implementation uses a range of dynamic allocation schemes in the
       called routine, with the caller responsible for subsequently
       releasing the storage when no longer required.  In some cases
       this simply involves calls to free(3), but in others (most
       notably for the result from pmFetch(3)), special routines (e.g.
       pmFreeResult(3) and pmFreeLabelSets(3)) should be used to release
       the storage.

       As a general rule, if the called routine returns an error status
       then no allocation will have been done, and any pointer to a
       variable sized result is undefined.

DIAGNOSTICS         top

       Where error conditions may arise, the functions that comprise the
       PMAPI conform to a single, simple error notification scheme, as
       follows;

       +  the function returns an integer

       +  values >= 0 indicate no error, and perhaps some positive
          status, e.g. the number of things really processed

       +  values < 0 indicate an error, with a global table of error
          conditions and error messages

       The PMAPI routine pmErrStr(3) translates error conditions into
       error messages.  By convention, the small negative values are
       assumed to be negated versions of the Unix error codes as defined
       in <errno.h> and the strings returned are as per strerror(3).
       The larger, negative error codes are PMAPI error conditions.

       One error, common to all PMAPI routines that interact with
       pmcd(1) on some host is PM_ERR_IPC, which indicates the
       communication link to pmcd(1) has been lost.

MULTI-THREADED APPLICATIONS         top

       The original design for PCP was based around single-threaded
       applications, or more strictly applications in which only one
       thread was ever expected to call the PCP libraries.  This
       restriction has been relaxed for libpcp to allow the most common
       PMAPI routines to be safely called from any thread in a multi-
       threaded application.

       However the following groups of functions and services in libpcp
       are still restricted to being called from a single-thread, and
       this is enforced by returning PM_ERR_THREAD when an attempt to
       call the routines in each group from more than one thread is
       detected.

       1.  Any use of a PM_CONTEXT_LOCAL context, as the DSO PMDAs that
           are called directly from libpcp may not be thread-safe.

PCP ENVIRONMENT         top

       Most environment variables are described in PCPIntro(1).  In
       addition, 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).  Values for these variables may be obtained
       programmatically using the pmGetConfig(3) function.

SEE ALSO         top

       PCPIntro(1), PCPIntro(3), PMDA(3), PMWEBAPI(3), pmGetConfig(3),
       pcp.conf(5), pcp.env(5) and PMNS(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                          PMAPI(3)

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