Monitor Systems for Vital Characteristics

Learning Objectives

Successfully complete this lab by achieving the following learning objectives:

Install Performance Co-Pilot.

Install pcp and pcp-system-tools.

Enable and start the pmcd and pmlogger services.

Take a baseline of CPU load.

Take a baseline of the kernel.all.load metric for 10 seconds and put this into the file /home/cloud_user/kernel.all.load.txt.

You can do this using the pmval or pmrep command:

pmval -T 10s kernel.all.load > /home/cloud_user/kernel.all.load.txt

Or:

pmrep -T 10s kernel.all.load > /home/cloud_user/kernel.all.load.txt

Take a baseline of disk I/O.

Take a baseline of the disk.partitions.total_rawactive metric for 10 seconds and put this into the file /home/cloud_user/disk.partitions.total_rawactive.txt.

You can do this using the pmval or pmrep command:

pmval -T 10s disk.partitions.total_rawactive > /home/cloud_user/disk.partitions.total_rawactive.txt

Or:

pmrep -T 10s disk.partitions.total_rawactive > /home/cloud_user/disk.partitions.total_rawactive.txt

Generate some disk I/O and CPU load.

By now, pmlogger has been running for a few minutes. Generate some load so that we can look at it in the archive.

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Before and after each of the commands that generate load, make a note of the system time. You can do so using the command:

date

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Generate some CPU load

Run the following command to generate some CPU load for 1 minute:

date && timeout -sHUP 1m openssl speed

Generate some disk I/O

Run the following command to generate some disk I/O:

date && fallocate -l 1G /home/cloud_user/bigfile && shred -zvu -n 1 /home/cloud_user/bigfile

Make a note of the start and end times from the commands above. We’ll need them to know when to look for the increases in resource usages.

Verify the CPU and disk load in the pcp archive file.

Get the pcp archive file:

pcp | grep logger

Look in the archive log directory and make note of the archive files:

ls -lh /var/log/pcp/pmlogger/ip-10-0-1-10.ec2.internal/

Depending on how long you’ve taken to do these tasks, the archive log may have rolled over to a new file. The format of the filename is YYYYMMDD.HH.MM. Using your notes of when you ran the CPU and disk I/O commands, determine which file to use.

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Display the kernel.all.load values from the selected archive log in 1 minute increments:

Note: You can use pmval or pmrep here, with these particular metrics, I find pmrep to be easier to read.

pmrep -t 1m -a /var/log/pcp/pmlogger/ip-10-0-1-10.ec2.internal/<FILE> kernel.all.load

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Display the disk.partitions.total_rawactive values from the selected archive log in 1 minute increments:

pmrep -t 1m -a /var/log/pcp/pmlogger/ip-10-0-1-10.ec2.internal/<FILE> disk.partitions.total_rawactive