See the file INSTALL (in this directory) for build, installation and
post-install configuration steps.

Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) is a framework and services to support
system-level performance monitoring and performance management.

The PCP open source release provides a unifying abstraction for all of
the interesting performance data in a system, and allows client
applications to easily retrieve and process any subset of that data
using a single API.

A client-server architecture allows multiple clients to monitor the
same host, and a single client to monitor multiple hosts (e.g. in a
Beowulf cluster).  This enables centralized monitoring of distributed
processing.

Integrated archive logging and replay so a client application can use
the same API to process real-time data from a host or historical data
from an archive.

The framework supports APIs and configuration file formats that enable
the scope of performance monitoring to be extended at all levels.

The architecture and services of the base PCP infrastructure are
especially attractive for those tackling the harder system-level
performance problems.  For example this may involve a transient
performance degradation, or some complex interaction between resource
demands on a single system, or those seeking centralized monitoring of
distributed processing (e.g. in a cluster or webserver farm
environment), or management of performance on large systems with lots
of moving parts.

The open source release of PCP includes all of the PCP libraries,
infrastructure and daemons, along with a Linux agent that exports a
broad range of performance data from most kernels circa 2.0.36 (RedHat
5.2) or later. This includes coverage of activity in the areas of:

    CPU 
    disk 
    memory 
    swapping 
    network 
    NFS 
    RPC 
    filesystems 
    all the per-process statistics 

Other agents export performance data from: 
    Apache
    Web server activity logs 
    arbitrary application-level tracing (via a PCP trace
    library) 
    Cisco routers 
    sendmail 
    the mail queue 
    the PCP infrastructure itself 

For more information and details on how to contribute to the PCP
project see the web pages at http://oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp/

