1IOSTAT2PCP(1) General Commands Manual IOSTAT2PCP(1)
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6 iostat2pcp - import iostat data and create a PCP archive
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9 iostat2pcp [-v] [-S start] [-t interval] [-V version] [-Z timezone] in‐
10 file outfile
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13 iostat2pcp reads a text file created with iostat(1) (infile) and trans‐
14 lates this into a Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) archive with the basename
15 outfile. If infile is ``-'' then iostat2pcp reads from standard input,
16 allowing easy preprocessing of the iostat(1) output with sed(1) or sim‐
17 ilar.
18 The resultant PCP archive 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 in‐
26 dex to improve efficiency of replay operations for the archive). If
27 any of these files exists already, then iostat2pcp will not overwrite
28 them and will exit with an error message.
29 The first output sample from iostat(1) contains a statistical summary
31 since boot time and is ignored by iostat2pcp, so the first real data
32 set is the second one in the iostat(1) output.
33 The best results are obtained when iostat(1) was run with its own -t
35 flag, so each output sample is prefixed with a timestamp. Even better
36 is -t with $S_TIME_FORMAT=ISO set in environment when iostat(1) is run,
37 in which case the timestamp includes the timezone.
38 Note that if $S_TIME_FORMAT=ISO is not used with the -t option then io‐
40 stat(1) may produce a timestamp controlled by LC_TIME from the locale
41 that is in a format iostat2pcp cannot parse. The formats for the time‐
42 stamp that iostat2pcp accepts are illustrated by these examples:
43 2013-07-06T21:34:39+1000
45 (for the $S_TIME_FORMAT=ISO).
46 2013-07-06 21:34:39
48 (for some of the European formats, e.g. de_AT, de_BE, de_LU and
49 en_DK.utf8).
50 06/07/13 21:34:39
52 (for all of the $LC_TIME settings for English locales outside North
53 America, e.g. en_AU, en_GB, en_IE, en_NZ, en_SG and en_ZA, and all
54 the Spanish locales, e.g. es_ES, es_MX and es_AR).
55 In particular, note that some common North American $LC_TIME settings
57 will not work with iostat2pcp (namely, en_US, POSIX and C) because they
58 use the MM/DD format which may be incorrectly converted with the as‐
59 sumed DD/MM format. This is another reason to recommend setting
60 $S_TIME_FORMAT=ISO.
61 If there are no timestamps in the input stream, iostat2pcp will try and
63 deduce the sample interval if basic Disk data (-d option for iostat(1))
64 is found. If this fails, then the -t option may be used to specify the
65 sample interval in seconds. This option is ignored if timestamps are
66 found in the input stream.
67 The -S option may be used to specify as start time for the first real
69 sample in infile, where start must have the format HH:MM:SS. This op‐
70 tion is ignored if timestamps are found in the input stream.
71 The -V option specifies the version for the output PCP archive. By de‐
73 fault the archive version $PCP_ARCHIVE_VERSION (set to 2 in current PCP
74 releases) is used, and the only values currently supported for version
75 are 2 or 3.
76 The -Z option may be used to specify a timezone. It must have the for‐
78 mat +HHMM (for hours and minutes East of UTC) or -HHMM (for hours and
79 minutes West of UTC). Note in particular that neither the zoneinfo
80 (aka Olson) format, e.g. Europe/Paris, nor the Posix TZ format, e.g.
81 EST+5 is allowed for the -Z option. This option is ignored if ISO
82 timestamps are found in the input stream. If the timezone is not spec‐
83 ified and cannot be deduced, it defaults to ``UTC''.
84 Some additional diagnostic output is generated with the -v option.
86 iostat2pcp is a Perl script that uses the PCP::LogImport Perl wrapper
88 around the PCP libpcp_import library, and as such could be used as an
89 example to develop new tools to import other types of performance data
90 and create PCP archives.
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93 The available command line options are:
94 -S start
96 Specify the start time for the first sample.
97 -t interval
99 Specify the sample interval in seconds.
100 -v Print verbose output.
102 -Z timezone
104 Specify the timezone to use, see above.
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107 iostat2pcp requires infile to have been created by the version of io‐
108 stat(1) from http://freshmeat.net/projects/sysstat.
109 iostat2pcp handles the -c (CPU), -d (Disk), -x (eXtended Disk) and -p
111 (Partition) report formats (including their -k, -m, -z and ALL vari‐
112 ants), but does not accommodate the -n (Network Filesystem) report for‐
113 mat from iostat(1); this is a demand-driven limitation rather than a
114 technical limitation.
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117 Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the
118 file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the file
119 /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. The
120 $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration
121 file, as described in pcp.conf(5).
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124 iostat(1), pmchart(1), pmie(1), pmlogger(1), sed(1), Date::Format(3pm),
125 Date::Parse(3pm), PCP::LogImport(3pm) and LOGIMPORT(3).
126Performance Co-Pilot PCP IOSTAT2PCP(1)