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)