SAR2PCP(1)						       Performance Co-Pilot							SAR2PCP(1)

NAME

       sar2pcp - Import sar data and create a PCP archive

SYNOPSIS

       sar2pcp infile outfile

DESCRIPTION

       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.

CAVEATS

       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).

SEE ALSO

       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).

3.8.10							       Performance Co-Pilot							SAR2PCP(1)