1SAR2PCP(1)                  General Commands Manual                 SAR2PCP(1)
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NAME

6       sar2pcp - import sar data and create a PCP archive
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SYNOPSIS

9       sar2pcp infile outfile
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DESCRIPTION

12       sar2pcp  is  intended  to read a binary System Activity Reporting (sar)
13       data file as created by sadc(1) (infile) and translate this into a Per‐
14       formance Co-Pilot (PCP) archive with the basename outfile.
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16       However,  if  infile  has  the  suffix .xml, then it will be considered
17       already in XML format and sar2pcp will operate directly on it.
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19       The resultant PCP achive may be used with all the PCP client  tools  to
20       graph  subsets of the data using pmchart(1), perform data reduction and
21       reporting, filter with the PCP inference engine pmie(1), etc.
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23       A series of physical files will be created  with  the  prefix  outfile.
24       These  are outfile.0 (the performance data), outfile.meta (the metadata
25       that describes the performance  data)  and  outfile.index  (a  temporal
26       index  to improve efficiency of replay operations for the archive).  If
27       any of these files exists already, then sar2pcp will not overwrite them
28       and will exit with an error message of the form
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30       __pmLogNewFile: blah.0 already exists, not over-written
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32       sar2pcp  is  a  Perl  script  that uses the PCP::LogImport Perl wrapper
33       around the PCP libpcp_import library, and as such could be used  as  an
34       example  to develop new tools to import other types of performance data
35       and create PCP archives.  A Python wrapper module is also available.
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CAVEATS

38       When not using the XML input option, sar2pcp requires  infile  to  have
39       been      created      by     a     version     of     sadc(1)     from
40       <http://sebastien.godard.pagesperso-orange.fr/>  which   includes   the
41       sadf(1)  utility to translate infile into an XML stream (any since ver‐
42       sion 6); sar2pcp will  automatically  run  sadf(1)  and  translate  the
43       resultant XML into a PCP archive.
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45       When  using  binary  sadc files it is important to ensure the installed
46       sadf is compatible with the version of sadc that  originally  generated
47       the  binary files.  Simply assuming a newer installed version will work
48       is unfortunately far too optimistic, and nor  should  one  assume  that
49       binary  data  from different platforms (e.g. different endianness) will
50       work - these issues are due to limitations in sadc and sadf, and not in
51       sar2pcp itself.
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53       Fortunately,  the  sadf  message indicating that an incompatibility has
54       been detected is consistent across versions, and is always prefixed
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56       Invalid system activity file
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58       Using an XML infile has the advantage that  the  installed  version  of
59       sadf is completely bypassed.  sar2pcp undertakes to transform any valid
60       XML produced by any of the different variations of sadf  into  a  valid
61       PCP  archive.  Any version of PCP will be able to interpret the archive
62       files produced by any version of sar2pcp, and you are also free to move
63       the binary PCP archive between different platforms, different hardware,
64       even different operating systems - it Just Works (TM).
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PCP ENVIRONMENT

67       Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the
68       file  and  directory names used by PCP.  On each installation, the file
69       /etc/pcp.conf contains the  local  values  for  these  variables.   The
70       $PCP_CONF  variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration
71       file, as described in pcp.conf(5).
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SEE ALSO

74       pmie(1),  pmchart(1),  pmlogger(1),  pmlogextract(1),  pmlogsummary(1),
75       sadc(1),    sadf(1),   sar(1),   Date::Parse(3pm),   Date::Format(3pm),
76       PCP::LogImport(3pm), XML::TokeParser(3pm) and LOGIMPORT(3).
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80Performance Co-Pilot                  PCP                           SAR2PCP(1)
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