pmlogextract(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CONFIGURATION FILE SYNTAX | CONFIGURATION FILE EXAMPLE | MARK RECORDS | METADATA CHECKS | CAVEATS | DIAGNOSTICS | FILES | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PMLOGEXTRACT(1)          General Commands Manual         PMLOGEXTRACT(1)

NAME         top

       pmlogextract - reduce, extract, concatenate and merge Performance
       Co-Pilot archives

SYNOPSIS         top

       pmlogextract [-dfmwxz?]  [-c configfile] [-S starttime] [-s
       samples] [-T endtime] [-V version] [-v volsamples] [-Z timezone]
       input [...] output

DESCRIPTION         top

       pmlogextract reads one or more Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)
       archives identified by input and creates a merged and/or reduced
       PCP archive in output.  Each input argument is either a name or a
       comma-separated list of names, and each name is the name of one
       file from an archive or the base name of an archive or the name
       of a directory containing one or more archives.  The nature of
       merging is controlled by the number of input archives, while the
       nature of data reduction is controlled by the command line
       arguments.  The input arguments must be archives created by
       pmlogger(1) with performance data collected from the same host,
       but usually over different time periods and possibly (although
       not usually) with different performance metrics being logged.

       If only one input is specified, then the default behavior simply
       copies the input PCP archive (with possible conversion to a newer
       version of the archive format, see -V below), into the output PCP
       archive.  When two or more PCP archives are specified as input,
       the archives are merged (or concatenated) and written to output.

       In the output archive a <mark> record may be inserted at a time
       just past the end of each of the input archive to indicate a
       possible temporal discontinuity between the end of one input
       archive and the start of the next input archive.  See the MARK
       RECORDS section below for more information.  There is no <mark>
       record after the end of the last (in temporal order) of the
       records from the input archive(s).

OPTIONS         top

       The available command line options are:

       -c config, --config=config
            Extract only the metrics specified in config from the input
            PCP archive(s).  The config syntax accepted by pmlogextract
            is explained in more detail in the CONFIGURATION FILE SYNTAX
            section.

       -d, --desperate
            Desperate mode.  Normally if a fatal error occurs, all trace
            of the partially written PCP archive output is removed.
            With the -d option, the output archive is not removed.

       -f, --first
            For most common uses, all of the input archives will have
            been collected in the same timezone.  But if this is not the
            case, then pmlogextract must choose one of the timezones
            from the input archives to be used as the timezone for the
            output archive.  The default is to use the timezone from the
            last input archive.  The -f option forces the timezone from
            the first input archive to be used.

       -m, --mark
            As described in the MARK RECORDS section below, sometimes it
            is possible to safely omit <mark> records from the output
            archive.  If the -m option is specified, then the epilogue
            and prologue test is skipped and a <mark> record will always
            be inserted at the end of each input archive (except the
            last).  This is the original behaviour for pmlogextract.

       -S starttime, --start=starttime
            Define the start of a time window to restrict the records
            processed; refer to PCPIntro(1).  See also the -w option.

       -s samples, --samples=samples
            The argument samples defines the number of samples (or
            records) to be written to output.  If samples is 0 or -s is
            not specified, pmlogextract will continue until the end of
            all the input archives or until the end of the time window
            as specified by -T, whichever comes first.  The -s option
            will override the -T option if it occurs sooner.

       -T endtime, --finish=endtime
            Define the end of a time window to restrict the records
            processed; refer to PCPIntro(1).  See also the -w option.

       -V version, --outputversion=version
            Each PCP archive has a version for the physical record
            format, currently 2 or 3.  By default, the output archive is
            created with a version equal to the maximum of the version
            of the input archives.  The -V option may be used to
            explicitly force the version for output, provided version is
            no smaller than the archive version that would have been
            chosen by the default rule.

            For example, specifying -V 3 may be used to produce a
            version 3 output archive from input archives that could be a
            mixture of version 2 and/or version 3.

       -v volsamples
            The output archive is potentially a multi-volume data set,
            and the -v option causes pmlogextract to start a new volume
            after volsamples records have been written to the archive.

            Independent of any -v option, each volume of an archive is
            limited to no more than 2^31 bytes, so pmlogextract will
            automatically create a new volume for the archive before
            this limit is reached.

       -w   Where -S and -T specify a time window within the same day,
            the -w flag will cause the data within the time window to be
            extracted, for every day in the archive.  For example, the
            options -w -S @11:00 -T @15:00 specify that pmlogextract
            should include archive records only for the periods from
            11am to 3pm on each day.  When -w is used, the output
            archive will contain <mark> records to indicate the temporal
            discontinuity between the end of one time window and the
            start of the next.

       -x   It is expected that the metadata (name, PMID, type,
            semantics and units) for each metric will be consistent
            across all of the input PCP archive(s) in which that metric
            appears.  In rare cases, e.g. in development, in QA and when
            a PMDA is upgraded, this may not be the case and
            pmlogextract will report the issue and abort without
            creating the output archive.  This is done so the problem
            can be fixed with pmlogrewrite(1) before retrying the merge.
            In unattended or QA environments it may be preferable to
            force the merge and omit the metrics with the mismatched
            metadata.  The -x option does this.

       -Z timezone, --timezone=timezone
            Use timezone when displaying the date and time in
            diagnostics.  Timezone is in the format of the environment
            variable TZ as described in environ(7).  The default is to
            initially use the timezone of the local host.

       -z, --hostzone
            Use the local timezone of the host from the input archive(s)
            when displaying the date and time in diagnostics.  The
            default is to initially use the timezone of the local host.

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

CONFIGURATION FILE SYNTAX         top

       The configfile contains metrics of interest - only those metrics
       (or instances) mentioned explicitly or implicitly in the
       configuration file will be included in the output archive.  Each
       specification must begin on a new line, and may span multiple
       lines in the configuration file.  Instances may also be
       specified, but they are optional.  The format for each
       specification is

               metric
       or
               metric [ instance ... ]

       where metric may be a leaf or a non-leaf name of a metric in the
       Performance Metrics Name Space (PMNS, see PMNS(5)).  If a metric
       refers to a non-leaf node in the PMNS, pmlogextract will
       recursively descend the PMNS and include all metrics
       corresponding to descendent leaf nodes.

       Instances are optional and are specified as a list space (or
       comma) separated of instance identifiers, with the list enclosed
       by square brackets.  Each instance identifier may be a number or
       a string (enclosed in single or double quotes).  instance
       identifiers that are numbers are assumed to be internal instance
       identifiers, else the string values are assumed to be external
       instance identifiers; see pmGetInDom(3) for more information.  If
       no instances are given, then all instances of the associated
       metric(s) will be extracted.

       Any additional white space is ignored and comments may be added
       with a `#' prefix.

CONFIGURATION FILE EXAMPLE         top

       This is an example of a valid configfile:

               #
               # config file for pmlogextract
               #

               kernel.all.cpu
               kernel.percpu.cpu.sys ["cpu0","cpu1"]
               disk.dev ["dks0d1"]

MARK RECORDS         top

       When more than one input archive contributes performance data to
       the output archive, then <mark> records may be inserted to
       indicate a possible temporal discontinuity in the performance
       data.

       A <mark> record contains a timestamp and no performance data and
       is used to indicate that there is a time period in the PCP
       archive where we do not know the values of any performance
       metrics, because there was no pmlogger(1) collecting performance
       data during this period.  Since these periods are often
       associated with the restart of a service or pmcd(1) or a system
       reboot, there may be considerable doubt as to the continuity of
       performance data across this time period.

       Most current archives are created with a prologue record at the
       beginning and an epilogue record at the end.  These records
       identify the state of pmcd(1) at the time, and may be used by
       pmlogextract to determine that there is no discontinuity between
       the end of one archive and the next output record, and as a
       consequence the <mark> record can safely be omitted from the
       output archive.

       The rationale behind <mark> records may be demonstrated with an
       example.  Consider one input archive that starts at 00:10 and
       ends at 09:15 on the same day, and another input archive that
       starts at 09:20 on the same day and ends at 00:10 the following
       morning.  This would be a very common case for archives managed
       and rotated by pmlogger_check(1) and pmlogger_daily(1).

       The output archive created by pmlogextract would contain:
       00:10.000    first record from first input archive
       ...
       09:15.000    last record from first input archive
       09:15.001    <mark> record
       09:20.000    first record from second input archive
       ...
       01:10.000    last record from second input archive

       The time period where the performance data is missing starts just
       after 09:15 and ends just before 09:20.  When the output archive
       is processed with any of the PCP reporting tools, the <mark>
       record is used to indicate a period of missing data.  For example
       using the output archive above, imagine one was reporting the
       average I/O rate at 30 minute intervals aligned on the hour and
       half-hour.  The I/O count metric is a counter, so the average I/O
       rate requires two valid values from consecutive sample times.
       There would be values for all the intervals ending at 09:00, then
       no values at 09:30 because of the <mark> record, then no values
       at 10:00 because the ``prior'' value at 09:30 is not available,
       then the rate would be reported again at 10:30 and continue every
       30 minutes until the last reported value at 01:00.

       The presence of <mark> records in a PCP archive can be
       established using pmdumplog(1) where a timestamp and the
       annotation <mark> is used to indicate a <mark> record.

METADATA CHECKS         top

       When more than one input archive is specified, pmlogextract
       performs a number of checks to ensure the metadata is consistent
       for metrics appearing in more than one of the input archives.
       These checks include:

       * metric data type is the same
       * metric semantics are the same
       * metric units are the same
       * metric is either always singular or always has the same
         instance domain
       * metrics with the same name have the same PMID
       * metrics with the same PMID have the same name

       If any of these checks fail, pmlogextract reports the details and
       aborts without creating the output archive.

       To address these semantic issues, use pmlogrewrite(1) to
       translate the input archives into equivalent archives with
       consistent metadata before using pmlogextract.

       Refer to the -x and -d command line options above for
       alternatives to the default handling of errors during metadata
       checks.

CAVEATS         top

       The prologue metrics (pmcd.pmlogger.archive, pmcd.pmlogger.host,
       and pmcd.pmlogger.port), which are automatically recorded by
       pmlogger at the start of the archive, may not be present in the
       archive output by pmlogextract.  These metrics are only relevant
       while the archive is being created, and have no significance once
       recording has finished.

DIAGNOSTICS         top

       All error conditions detected by pmlogextract are reported on
       stderr with textual (if sometimes terse) explanation.

       If one of the input archives contains no archive records then an
       ``empty archive'' warning is issued and that archive is skipped.

       Should one of the input archive(s) be corrupted (this can happen
       if the pmlogger instance writing the archive suddenly dies), then
       pmlogextract will detect and report the position of the
       corruption in the file, and any subsequent information from that
       archive will not be processed.

       If any error is detected, pmlogextract will exit with a non-zero
       status.

FILES         top

       For each of the input and output archive, several physical files
       are used.

       archive.meta
            metadata (metric descriptions, instance domains, etc.) for
            the archive

       archive.0
            initial volume of metrics values (subsequent volumes have
            suffixes 1, 2, ...) - for input these files may have been
            previously compressed with bzip2(1) or gzip(1) and thus may
            have an additional .bz2 or .gz suffix.

       archive.index
            temporal index to support rapid random access to the other
            files in the archive.

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).

       For environment variables affecting PCP tools, see
       pmGetOptions(3).

SEE ALSO         top

       PCPIntro(1), pmdumplog(1), pmlc(1), pmlogger(1), pmlogreduce(1),
       pmlogrewrite(1), 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                   PMLOGEXTRACT(1)

Pages that refer to this page: ganglia2pcp(1)pcpintro(1)pmlogcheck(1)pmlogdump(1)pmlogger(1)pmlogger_daily(1)pmlogger_merge(1)pmloglabel(1)pmlogpaste(1)pmlogreduce(1)pmlogrewrite(1)pmlogsummary(1)pmrep(1)sar2pcp(1)pmfetch(3)pmfetcharchive(3)LOGARCHIVE(5)