1IOSTAT2PCP(1) General Commands Manual IOSTAT2PCP(1)
2
6 iostat2pcp - import iostat data and create a PCP archive
7
9 iostat2pcp [-v] [-S start] [-t interval] [-Z timezone] infile outfile
10
12 iostat2pcp reads a text file created with iostat(1) (infile) and trans‐
13 lates this into a Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) archive with the basename
14 outfile. If infile is - then iostat2pcp reads from standard input,
15 allowing easy preprocessing of the iostat(1) output with sed(1) or sim‐
16 ilar.
17 The resultant PCP archive may be used with all the PCP client tools to
19 graph subsets of the data using pmchart(1), perform data reduction and
20 reporting, filter with the PCP inference engine pmie(1), etc.
21 A series of physical files will be created with the prefix outfile.
23 These are outfile.0 (the performance data), outfile.meta (the metadata
24 that describes the performance data) and outfile.index (a temporal
25 index to improve efficiency of replay operations for the archive). If
26 any of these files exists already, then iostat2pcp will not overwrite
27 them and will exit with an error message.
28 The first output sample from iostat(1) contains a statistical summary
30 since boot time and is ignored by iostat2pcp, so the first real data
31 set is the second one in the iostat(1) output.
32 The best results are obtained when iostat(1) was run with its own -t
34 flag, so each output sample is prefixed with a timestamp. Even better
35 is -t with $S_TIME_FORMAT=ISO set in environment when iostat(1) is run,
36 in which case the timestamp includes the timezone.
37 Note that if $S_TIME_FORMAT=ISO is not used with the -t option then
39 iostat(1) may produce a timestamp controlled by LC_TIME from the locale
40 that is in a format iostat2pcp cannot parse. The formats for the time‐
41 stamp that iostat2pcp accepts are illustrated by these examples:
42 2013-07-06T21:34:39+1000
44 (for the $S_TIME_FORMAT=ISO).
45 2013-07-06 21:34:39
47 (for some of the European formats, e.g. de_AT, de_BE, de_LU and
48 en_DK.utf8).
49 06/07/13 21:34:39
51 (for all of the $LC_TIME settings for English locales outside North
52 America, e.g. en_AU, en_GB, en_IE, en_NZ, en_SG and en_ZA, and all
53 the Spanish locales, e.g. es_ES, es_MX and es_AR).
54 In particular, note that some common North American $LC_TIME settings
56 will not work with iostat2pcp (namely, en_US, POSIX and C) because they
57 use the MM/DD format which may be incorrectly converted with the
58 assumed DD/MM format. This is another reason to recommend setting
59 $S_TIME_FORMAT=ISO.
60 If there are no timestamps in the input stream, iostat2pcp will try and
62 deduce the sample interval if basic Disk data (-d option for iostat(1))
63 is found. If this fails, then the -t option may be used to specify the
64 sample interval in seconds. This option is ignored if timestamps are
65 found in the input stream.
66 The -S option may be used to specify as start time for the first real
68 sample in infile, where start must have the format HH:MM:SS. This
69 option is ignored if timestamps are found in the input stream.
70 The -Z option may be used to specify a timezone. It must have the for‐
72 mat +HHMM (for hours and minutes East of UTC) or -HHMM (for hours and
73 minutes West of UTC). Note in particular that neither the zoneinfo
74 (aka Olson) format, e.g. Europe/Paris, nor the Posix TZ format, e.g.
75 EST+5 is allowed for the -Z option. This option is ignored if ISO
76 timestamps are found in the input stream. If the timezone is not spec‐
77 ified and cannot be deduced, it defaults to UTC.
78 Some additional diagnostic output is generated with the -v option.
80 iostat2pcp is a Perl script that uses the PCP::LogImport Perl wrapper
82 around the PCP libpcp_import library, and as such could be used as an
83 example to develop new tools to import other types of performance data
84 and create PCP archives.
85
87 iostat2pcp requires infile to have been created by the version of
88 iostat(1) from <http://freshmeat.net/projects/sysstat>.
89 iostat2pcp handles the -c (CPU), -d (Disk), -x (eXtended Disk) and -p
91 (Partition) report formats (including their -k, -m, -z and ALL vari‐
92 ants), but does not accommodate the -n (Network Filesystem) report for‐
93 mat from iostat(1); this is a demand-driven limitation rather than a
94 technical limitation.
95
97 Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the
98 file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the file
99 /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. The
100 $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration
101 file, as described in pcp.conf(5).
102
104 iostat(1), pmchart(1), pmie(1), pmlogger(1), sed(1), Date::Format(3pm),
105 Date::Parse(3pm), PCP::LogImport(3pm) and LOGIMPORT(3).
106Performance Co-Pilot PCP IOSTAT2PCP(1)