About This Guide
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## About This Guide

This guide describes the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) software package of advanced performance tools for the SGI family of graphical workstations and servers.

The Performance Co-Pilot for IRIX User's and Administrator's Guide documents the PCP features that are embedded in the IRIX operating system. It is a prequel to the Performance Co-Pilot for IRIX Advanced User's and Administrator's Guide.

PCP provides a systems-level suite of tools that cooperate to deliver integrated performance monitoring and performance management services spanning the hardware platforms, operating systems, service layers, Database Management Systems (DBMSs), and user applications.

“About This Guide” includes short descriptions of the chapters in this book, directs you to additional sources of information, and explains typographical conventions.

## What This Guide Contains

This guide contains the following chapters:

- Chapter 1, “Introduction to Performance Co-Pilot”, provides an introduction and conceptual foundations of the PCP product.

- Chapter 2, “Installing and Configuring Performance Co-Pilot”, describes the basic installation and configuration steps necessary to get PCP running on your systems.

- Chapter 3, “Common Conventions and Arguments”, summarizes user interface components that are common to most of the graphical tools and text-based utilities that constitute the PCP monitor software.

- Chapter 4, “Monitoring System Performance”, describes the basic interactive performance monitoring tools available in PCP, including `pmkstat`, `pmval`, `pmem`, `pminfo`, `pmstore`, and `oview`.

- Chapter 5, “Performance Metrics Inference Engine”, introduces the automated reasoning facilities of PCP that provide both real-time and retrospective filtering of performance data to identify adverse performance scenarios and raise alarms.

- Chapter 6, “Archive Logging”, covers the PCP services and utilities that support archive logging for capturing accurate historical performance records.

- Chapter 7, “Performance Co-Pilot Deployment Strategies”, describes some different deployment strategies for PCP, because each enterprise and site is different and PCP represents a new way of visualizing performance information.

- Chapter 8, “Customizing and Extending PCP Services”, describes the procedures necessary to ensure that the PCP configuration is customized in ways that maximize the coverage and quality of performance monitoring and management services.

- Appendix A, “Acronyms”, provides a comprehensive list of the acronyms used in this guide, in the man pages, and in the release notes for Performance Co-Pilot.

## Audience for This Guide

This guide is written for the system administrator or performance analyst who is directly using and administering PCP applications. It is assumed that you have installed IRIS InSight for viewing online books, or have access to the IRIX Admin manual set, including IRIX Admin: System Configuration and Operation, and the Personal System Administration Guide as hard-copy documents.

## Related Resources

Additional resources include man pages, release notes, and SGI Web sites.

### Man Pages

The IRIX man pages provide concise reference information on the use of IRIX commands, subroutines, and system resources. There is usually a man page for each PCP command or subroutine. To see a list of all the PCP man pages, enter the following command:

    man -k performance

To see a particular man page, supply its name to the `man` command, for example:

    man pcp

The man pages are divided into the following seven sections:

(1) | General commands
(2) | System calls and error numbers
(3) | Library subroutines
(4) | File formats
(5) | Miscellaneous
(6) | Demos and games
(7) | Special files

When referring to man pages, this guide follows a standard UNIX convention: the section number in parentheses follows the item. For example, `pmda(3)` refers to the man page in section 3 for the `pmda` command.

### Release Notes

Release notes provide specific information about the current product release, available online through the `relnotes` command. Exceptions to the printed and online documentation are found in the release notes. The `grelnotes` command provides a graphical interface to the release notes of all products installed on your system. For additional information, see the `relnotes(1)` and `grelnotes(1)` man pages.

### SGI Web Sites

The following Web sites are accessible to everyone with general Internet access:

URL | Description
http://www.sgi.com | The SGI general Web site, with search capability
http://www.sgi.com/software | Links to Performance Co-Pilot product information
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp | Some parts of the PCP infrastructure that have also been released as open source

## Obtaining Publications

To obtain SGI documentation, go to the SGI Technical Publications Library at http://docs.sgi.com.

## Conventions

The following conventions are used throughout this document:

Convention |  | Meaning
`command` |  | This fixed-space font denotes literal items such as commands, files, routines, path names, signals, messages, and programming language structures.
variable |  | Italic typeface denotes variable entries and words or concepts being defined.
`user input` |  | This bold, fixed-space font denotes literal items that the user enters in interactive sessions. (Output is shown in nonbold, fixed-space font.)
[ ] |  | Brackets enclose optional portions of a command or directive line.
... |  | Ellipses indicate that a preceding element can be repeated.
ALL CAPS |  | All capital letters denote environment variables, operator names, directives, defined constants, and macros in C programs.
() |  | Parentheses that follow function names surround function arguments or are empty if the function has no arguments; parentheses that follow IRIX commands surround man page section numbers.

## Reader Comments

If you have comments about the technical accuracy, content, or organization of this document, contact SGI. Be sure to include the title and document number of the manual with your comments. (Online, the document number is located in the front matter of the manual. In printed manuals, the document number is located at the bottom of each page.)

You can contact SGI in any of the following ways:

- Send e-mail to the following address:

  techpubs@sgi.com

- Use the Feedback option on the Technical Publications Library Web page:

  http://docs.sgi.com

- Contact your customer service representative and ask that an incident be filed in the SGI incident tracking system.

- Send mail to the following address:

  Technical Publications
  SGI
  1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, M/S 535
  Mountain View, California 94043-1351

- Send a fax to the attention of “Technical Publications” at +1 650 932 0801.

SGI values your comments and will respond to them promptly.

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New Features in This Guide |  | Chapter 1. Introduction to Performance Co-Pilot