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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | CAVEATS | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
SAR2PCP(1) General Commands Manual SAR2PCP(1)
sar2pcp - import sar data and create a PCP archive
sar2pcp infile outfile
sar2pcp is intended to read a binary System Activity Reporting (sar)
data file as created by sadc(1) (infile) and translate this into a
Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) archive with the basename outfile.
However, if infile has the suffix .xml, then it will be considered
already in XML format and sar2pcp will operate directly on it.
The resultant PCP achive may be used with all the PCP client tools to
graph subsets of the data using pmchart(1), perform data reduction
and reporting, filter with the PCP inference engine pmie(1), etc.
A series of physical files will be created with the prefix outfile.
These are outfile.0 (the performance data), outfile.meta (the
metadata that describes the performance data) and outfile.index (a
temporal index to improve efficiency of replay operations for the
archive). If any of these files exists already, then sar2pcp will
not overwrite them and will exit with an error message of the form
__pmLogNewFile: blah.0 already exists, not over-written
sar2pcp is a Perl script that uses the PCP::LogImport Perl wrapper
around the PCP libpcp_import library, and as such could be used as an
example to develop new tools to import other types of performance
data and create PCP archives. A Python wrapper module is also
available.
When not using the XML input option, sar2pcp requires infile to have
been created by a version of sadc(1) from
<http://sebastien.godard.pagesperso-orange.fr/> which includes the
sadf(1) utility to translate infile into an XML stream (any since
version 6); sar2pcp will automatically run sadf(1) and translate the
resultant XML into a PCP archive.
When using binary sadc files it is important to ensure the installed
sadf is compatible with the version of sadc that originally generated
the binary files. Simply assuming a newer installed version will
work is unfortunately far too optimistic, and nor should one assume
that binary data from different platforms (e.g. different endianness)
will work - these issues are due to limitations in sadc and sadf, and
not in sar2pcp itself.
Fortunately, the sadf message indicating that an incompatibility has
been detected is consistent across versions, and is always prefixed
Invalid system activity file
Using an XML infile has the advantage that the installed version of
sadf is completely bypassed. sar2pcp undertakes to transform any
valid XML produced by any of the different variations of sadf into a
valid PCP archive. Any version of PCP will be able to interpret the
archive files produced by any version of sar2pcp, and you are also
free to move the binary PCP archive between different platforms,
different hardware, even different operating systems - it Just Works
(TM).
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).
pmie(1), pmchart(1), pmlogger(1), pmlogextract(1), pmlogsummary(1),
sadc(1), sadf(1), sar(1), Date::Parse(3pm), Date::Format(3pm),
PCP::LogImport(3pm), XML::TokeParser(3pm) and LOGIMPORT(3).
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 SAR2PCP(1)