Josef “Jeff” Sipek

In my previous post, I introduced Performance Co-Pilot (PCP). I know, I promised the next post to be about logging, but I thought I’d make a short detour and show how to install more PMDAs.

After installing PCP on a Linux system, you will have access to somewhere around 850 various metrics from the three basic PMDAs (pmcd, linux, and mmv). There are many more metrics that you can get at if you enable some of the non-default PMDAs.

I pondered what the best way to present a simple howto would be, and then I realized that simply copying & pasting a session where I install a PMDA will do.

First of all, all the PMDAs live in /var/lib/pcp/pmdas/.

# cd /var/lib/pcp/pmdas/
# ls
apache	 gpsd	    lustrecomm	mounts	   news     process   sendmail	systemtap  vmware
bonding  kvm	    mailq	mysql	   pdns     roomtemp  shping	trace	   weblog
cisco	 linux	    memcache	named	   pmcd     samba     simple	trivial    zimbra
dbping	 lmsensors  mmv		netfilter  postfix  sample    summary	txmon

In this post, I will use the PowerDNS PMDA as an example, but the steps are the same for the other PMDAs.

# cd pdns/
# ls
Install  Remove  pmdapdns.pl

As you can see, there are three files in this directory. We are interested in the Install script. Simply run it as root, and when it asks whether you want a collector, a monitor, or both answer appropriately — if you are running the daemon on the same host, answering both is your best bet. (I never had the need to answer anything else.)

# ./Install 
You will need to choose an appropriate configuration for installation of
the "pdns" Performance Metrics Domain Agent (PMDA).

  collector	collect performance statistics on this system
  monitor	allow this system to monitor local and/or remote systems
  both		collector and monitor configuration for this system

Please enter c(ollector) or m(onitor) or b(oth) [b] 
Updating the Performance Metrics Name Space (PMNS) ...
Compiled PMNS contains
	  197 hash table entries
	  847 leaf nodes
	  132 non-leaf nodes
	 8149 bytes of symbol table
Terminate PMDA if already installed ...
Updating the PMCD control file, and notifying PMCD ...
Check pdns metrics have appeared ... 22 warnings, 60 metrics and 42 values

At this point, the PMDA has been installed (take a look at /etc/pmcd/pmcd.conf to see the new config line there enabling the new PMDA). Now, we can see the new metrics using pminfo (there are many more, I just pruned the list for brevity):

# pminfo pdns
pdns.packetcache_hit
pdns.tcp_answers
pdns.packetcache_miss

We are done!

If you decide to uninstall a PMDA, just cd into the directory and run the Remove script.