Setting up PCP – Performance Co-Pilot

Over the years, a lot of tools have been created to troubleshoot performance issues on your systems, such as top, sar, iotop, iostat, iftop, vmstat, dstat, and others. However, none of these integrate with each other, some are extensions to others, and so on.

PCP seems to have a couple of things right: it monitors just about every aspect of your system, it allows the centralized storage of (important) performance data, and it allows you to use not only live data, but also saved data among others.

How to do it…

In this recipe, we'll look at both the "default" setup and "collector" configuration, which allows you to pull in all the performance data you want.

The default installation

This is the basic setup of PCP:

1. Let's install the necessary packages; run the following command:

   ~]# yum install -y pcp
   

2. Now, enable and start the necessary daemons, as follows:

   ~]# systemctl enable pmcd
   ~]# systemctl enable pmlogger
   ~]# systemctl start pmcd
   ~]# systemctl start pmlogger...