Monitor Systems for Vital Characteristics

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Monitor Systems for Vital Characteristics

In this exercise, you will need to configure monitoring on a system with Performance Co-Pilot. *This course is not approved or sponsored by Red Hat.*

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Jun 22, 2025

Duration

1h 30m

Challenge

Install Performance Co-Pilot.

Install pcp and pcp-system-tools.

Enable and start the pmcd and pmlogger services.
Challenge

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
```
Challenge

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
```
Challenge

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.

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
```
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.
Challenge

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.

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/&lt;FILE&gt; kernel.all.load
```
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/&lt;FILE&gt; disk.partitions.total_rawactive
```

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