PCP — Performance Co-Pilot

What it is¶

Performance Co-Pilot is a metrics framework: a collector daemon (pmcd) exposes hundreds of metrics, pmlogger archives them, and many command-line tools and exporters read them. It also supplies compatible replacements for tools such as dstat (see dstat).

sudo dnf -y install pcp                     # RHEL family; apt-get install pcp on Debian/Ubuntu
sudo systemctl enable --now pmcd pmlogger

The package installs a lot of commands: pminfo, pmval, pmstat, pmlogger, pmie (rules/alerts), pmdumplog, pmlogextract, pcp2csv, and more. rpm -ql pcp | grep bin lists them.

Live queries¶

pminfo -dt proc.nprocs                      # metric metadata: type, semantics, help
pmval -s 5 proc.nprocs                      # 5 samples
pmval -T 1minute kernel.percpu.cpu.idle     # sample for one minute
pmstat 1                                    # vmstat-like summary

Archives¶

pmlogger writes archives under /var/log/pcp/pmlogger/<host>/.

pcp | grep 'primary logger'                 # where the current archive is
ls -1 /var/log/pcp/pmlogger/$(hostname)/    # list archives
pmval -a /var/log/pcp/pmlogger/$(hostname)/20260920.00.10 kernel.all.load    # read a metric from history
pmdumplog -l /var/log/pcp/pmlogger/$(hostname)/20260920.00.10               # archive label and time span

For a lighter historical view, see sysstat/sar.