- Lab
-
Libraries: If you want this lab, consider one of these libraries.
- Cloud

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.*

Lab Info
Table of Contents
-
Challenge
Install Performance Co-Pilot.
Install
pcp
andpcp-system-tools
.Enable and start the
pmcd
andpmlogger
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
orpmrep
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
orpmrep
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
orpmrep
here, with these particular metrics, I findpmrep
to be easier to read.pmrep -t 1m -a /var/log/pcp/pmlogger/ip-10-0-1-10.ec2.internal/<FILE> 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/<FILE> disk.partitions.total_rawactive
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