pmie_check - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

pmie_check, pmie_daily - administration of the Performance Co-Pilot inference engine

SYNOPSIS

$PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check [-CNsV] [-c control] [-l logfile]
$PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_daily [-NV] [-c control] [-k discard] [-l logfile] [-m addresses] [-x
compress] [-X program] [-Y regex]

DESCRIPTION

This series of shell scripts and associated control files may be used to create a
customized regime of administration and management for the Performance Co-Pilot (see
PCPintro(1)) inference engine, pmie(1).

pmie_daily is intended to be run once per day, preferably in the early morning, as soon
after midnight as practicable. Its task is to rotate the log files for the running pmie
processes - these files may grow without bound if the ``print'' action is used, or any
other pme action writes to its stdout/stderr streams. After some period, old pmie log
files are discarded. This period is 14 days by default, but may be changed using the -k
option. Two special values are recognized for the period (discard), namely 0 to keep no
log files beyond the current one, and forever to prevent any log files being discarded.

Log files can optionally be compressed after some period (compress), to conserve disk
space. This is particularly useful for large numbers of pmie processes under the control
of pmie_check. The -x option specifies the number of days after which to compress archive
data files, and the -X option specifies the program to use for compression - by default
this is xz(1). Use of the -Y option allows a regular expression to be specified causing
files in the set of files matched for compression to be omitted - this allows only the
data file to be compressed, and also prevents the program from attempting to compress it
more than once. The default regex is ".(meta|index|Z|gz|bz2|zip|xz|lzma|lzo|lz4)$" - such
files are filtered using the -v option to egrep(1).

Use of the -m option causes pmie_daily to construct a summary of the log files generated
for all monitored hosts in the last 24 hours (lines matching `` OK '' are culled), and e-
mail that summary to the set of space-separated addresses.

pmie_check may be run at any time, and is intended to check that the desired set of
pmie(1) processes are running, and if not to re-launch any failed inference engines. Use
of the -s option provides the reverse functionality, allowing the set of pmie processes to
be cleanly shutdown. Use of the -C option queries the system service runlevel information
for pmie, and uses that to determine whether to start or stop processes.

Both pmie_check and pmie_daily are controlled by PCP inference engine control file(s) that
specify the pmie instances to be managed. The default control file is
$PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH but an alternate may be specified using the -c option. If the
directory $PCP_PMLOGGERCONTROL_PATH.d (or control.d from the -c option) exists, then the
contents of any additional control files therein will be appended to the main control file
(which must exist).

The control file(s) should be customized according to the following rules.

1. Lines beginning with a ``#'' are comments.
2. Lines beginning with a ``$'' are assumed to be assignments to environment variables
in the style of sh(1), and all text following the ``$'' will be eval'ed by the
script reading the control file, and the corresponding variable exported into the
environment. This is particularly useful to set and export variables into the
environment of the administrative script, e.g.
$ PMCD_CONNECT_TIMEOUT=20
Warning: The $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH and $PCP_PMIECONTROL_PATH.d files must not be
writable by any user other than root.
3. There should be one line in the control file(s) for each pmie instance of the form:

host y|n logfile args

4. Fields within a line of the control file(s) are separated by one or more spaces or
tabs.
5. The first field is the name of the host that is the default source of the
performance metrics for this pmie instance.
6. The second field indicates whether this pmie instance needs to be started under the
control of pmsocks(1) to connect to a pmcd through a firewall (y or n).
8. The third field is the name of the pmie activity log file. A useful convention is
that pmie instances monitoring the local host with hostname myhost are maintained
in the directory $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/myhost, while activity logs for the remote host
mumble are maintained in $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/mumble. This is consistent with the way
pmlogger(1) maintains its activity logs and archive files.
9. All other fields are interpreted as arguments to be passed to pmie(1). Most
typically this would be the -c option.

The following sample control lines specify one pmie instance monitoring the local host
(wobbly), and another monitoring performance metrics from the host splat.

wobbly n PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/wobbly -c config.default
splat n PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/splat -c splat/cpu.conf

Typical crontab(5) entries for periodic execution of pmie_daily and pmie_check are given
in $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmie/crontab (unless installed by default in /etc/cron.d already) and
shown below.

# daily processing of pmie logs
08 0 * * * $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_daily
# every 30 minutes, check pmie instances are running
28,58 * * * * $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check

In order to ensure that mail is not unintentionally sent when these scripts are run from
cron(8) diagnostics are always sent to log files. By default, these files are
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/pmie_daily.log and $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmie/pmie_check.log but this can be
changed using the -l option. If this log file already exists when the script starts, it
will be renamed with a .prev suffix (overwriting any log file saved earlier) before
diagnostics are generated to the new log file.

The output from the cron execution of the scripts may be extended using the -V option to
the scripts which will enable verbose tracing of their activity. By default the scripts
generate no output unless some error or warning condition is encountered.

The -N option enables a ``show me'' mode, where the actions are echoed, but not executed,
in the style of ``make -n''. Using -N in conjunction with -V maximizes the diagnostic
capabilities for debugging.

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