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

PMDIFF(1)                  General Commands Manual                 PMDIFF(1)

NAME         top

       pmdiff - compares archives and report significant differences

SYNOPSIS         top

       pmdiff [-d/--keep] [-z/--hostzone] [-p/--precision precision]
       [-q/--threshold thres] [-S/--start starttime] [-T/--finish endtime]
       [-B/--begin starttime] [-E/--end endtime] [-x metric] [-X file]
       [--skip-excluded] [--skip-missing] [-Z/--timezone timezone] archive1
       [archive2]

DESCRIPTION         top

       pmdiff compares the average values for every metric in either one or
       two sets of archives, in a given time window, for changes that are
       likely to be of interest when searching for performance regressions.
       The archive specifiers archive1 and archive2 may be comma-separated
       lists of names, each of which may be the base name of an archive or
       the name of a directory containing one or more archives. Each archive
       in the resulting set of archives must have been previously created
       using pmlogger(1).  The pmlogsummary(1) utility is used to obtain the
       average values used for comparison.
       There are two sorts of invocation of the tool: with either one or two
       sets of archives.
       In the first case, the only sensible command line requires use of all
       four time window arguments.  These are specified using the same time
       window format described in PCPIntro(1), and are -S/--start and
       -T/--finish for the start and end times of the first time window of
       interest in the archive set, and -B/--before and -E/--end for the
       start and end times of the second time window of interest.
       In the second case, with two sets of archives, the -B/--before and
       -E/--end options might be unnecessary.  This might be the case, for
       example, when comparing the same time window of two consecutive days
       (usually two separate sets of archives), or a time window on the same
       day of different weeks.
       In either case, pmdiff produces a sorted summary of those metrics in
       the specified window whose values have deviated the most from a
       minimal threshold.  The level of deviation is calculated by dividing
       the average value of each metric in both logs, and then calculating
       whether the ratio falls outside of a range considered normal.  This
       ratio can be adjusted using the -q/--threshold option, and by default
       it is 2 (i.e. report all metrics with average values that have more
       than doubled in the two time windows or more than halved in the two
       time windows).
       If the baseline value is zero and the comparison value is non-zero,
       the ratio is reported as ``|+|'' (infinitely large).  If the
       comparison value is zero and the baseline value is non-zero, the
       ratio is reported as ``|-|'' (infinitely small).
       Reported metrics are sorted in ascending ratio order.
       Should any metrics be present in one window but missing from the
       other, a diagnostic will be displayed listing each missing metric and
       the archive set from which it was missing.
       The remaining options control the specific information to be
       reported.  Metrics with counter semantics are converted to rates
       before being evaluated.
       -p/--precision
            Print all floating point numbers with precision digits after the
            decimal place.
       --skip-excluded
            Cull the list of names of metrics being excluded from the
            output.
       --skip-missing
            By default, pmdiff will report the names of any metrics that are
            in one archive set but not the other.  This option suppresses
            that reporting.
       -x   Compare each metric in each archive set in the time windows
            specified to a given egrep(1) pattern, excluding those that
            match from the report output.
       -X   Allows a file to be specified which containing egrep(1) patterns
            which are applied to the metric names to optionally exclude some
            from the report.
       -z   Use the local timezone from the given archive set.
       -Z/--timezone
            Changes the timezone in the archive labels to timezone in the
            format of the environment variable TZ as described in
            environ(7).

FILES         top

       $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/hostname
                 Default directory for PCP archives containing performance
                 metric values collected from the host hostname.

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), pmlogger(1), pmlogsummary(1), egrep(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@oss.sgi.com.  This page was obtained from the project's upstream
       Git repository ⟨git://git.pcp.io/pcp⟩ on 2017-07-05.  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                           PMDIFF(1)

Pages that refer to this page: pmrep(1)