1SAR2PCP(1) General Commands Manual SAR2PCP(1)
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6 sar2pcp - import sar data and create a PCP archive
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9 sar2pcp infile outfile
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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.
15 However, if infile has the suffix ``.xml'', then it will be considered
17 already in XML format and sar2pcp will operate directly on it.
18 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.
22 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
29 __pmLogNewFile: ``blah.0'' already exists, not over-written
31 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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38 As of sysstat version 12.0.5, sadc(1) has added functionality to
39 directly write PCP archive files. To produce archive files from sar
40 run:
41 $ sadf -l -O pcparchive=ARCHIVE_NAME sar.dat -- -A
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46 When not using the XML input option, sar2pcp requires infile to have
47 been created by a version of sadc(1) from
48 <http://sebastien.godard.pagesperso-orange.fr/> which includes the
49 sadf(1) utility to translate infile into an XML stream (any since ver‐
50 sion 6); sar2pcp will automatically run sadf(1) and translate the
51 resultant XML into a PCP archive.
52 When using binary sadc files it is important to ensure the installed
54 sadf is compatible with the version of sadc that originally generated
55 the binary files. Simply assuming a newer installed version will work
56 is unfortunately far too optimistic, and nor should one assume that
57 binary data from different platforms (e.g. different endianness) will
58 work - these issues are due to limitations in sadc and sadf, and not in
59 sar2pcp itself.
60 Fortunately, the sadf message indicating that an incompatibility has
62 been detected is consistent across versions, and is always prefixed
63 Invalid system activity file
65 Using an XML infile has the advantage that the installed version of
67 sadf is completely bypassed. sar2pcp undertakes to transform any valid
68 XML produced by any of the different variations of sadf into a valid
69 PCP archive. Any version of PCP will be able to interpret the archive
70 files produced by any version of sar2pcp, and you are also free to move
71 the binary PCP archive between different platforms, different hardware,
72 even different operating systems - it Just Works (TM).
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75 Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the
76 file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the file
77 /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. The
78 $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration
79 file, as described in pcp.conf(5).
80 For environment variables affecting PCP tools, see pmGetOptions(3).
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84 pmie(1), pmchart(1), pmlogger(1), pmlogextract(1), pmlogsummary(1),
85 sadc(1), sadf(1), sar(1), Date::Parse(3pm), Date::Format(3pm),
86 PCP::LogImport(3pm), XML::TokeParser(3pm) and LOGIMPORT(3).
87Performance Co-Pilot PCP SAR2PCP(1)