Provided by: pcp_6.3.1-1_amd64 
NAME
PCPCompat, pcp-collectl, pmmgr, pmwebd - backward-compatibility in the Performance Co-
Pilot (PCP)
INTRODUCTION
The Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) is a toolkit designed for monitoring and managing system-
level performance. These services are distributed and scalable to accommodate the most
complex system configurations and performance problems.
In order to achieve these goals effectively, protocol and on-disk compatibility is
provided between different versions of PCP. It is feasible (and indeed encouraged) to use
current PCP tools to interrogate any remote, down-rev or up-rev pmcd(1) and also to replay
any historical PCP archive (the PCP testsuite includes PCP archives created over 20 years
ago!).
From time to time the PCP developers deprecate and remove PCP utilities, replacing them
with new versions of utilities providing comparable features. This page describes
replacement utilities for historical PCP tools.
PYTHON2
PCP provides python(1) interfaces for the PMAPI(3) (Performance Metrics API), the PMDA(3)
API (Performance Metrics Domain Agents), the mmv_stats_register(3) API (Memory-Mapped
Values) and PCP archive creation LOGIMPORT(3) API.
With python version 2 reaching end-of-life in 2020 we have deprecated the python version 2
interfaces in PCP (shipped, but no longer supported). In the next major release of PCP
(v7) version 2 support will be retired (completely removed). All PCP APIs and python-
based tools support python version 3 and have for several years - upgrading is strongly
recommended.
QT4
PCP provides optional graphical user interfaces built on the cross-platform Qt library,
particularly pmchart(1) and pmtime(1).
With Qt v4 reaching end-of-life in 2015 we have removed support for all versions before Qt
v5. In addition, some features are missing in early versions of Qt v5 that are now
mandatory when building and using PCP Qt tools. As a result the minimum required version
of Qt for PCP v6 and beyond is now Qt 5.6.
NSS
Versions of PCP before v6 used a combination of both Mozilla NSS (Network Security
Services) and OpenSSL for the encryption component of the secure sockets functionality.
Starting with PCP v6 this has been simplified into exclusive use of OpenSSL for all use of
encryption across PCP. This change affects configuration of optional functionality in
pmcd(1) and PMAPI(3) client tools using secure sockets.
The net effect of this change is that encryption is configured in the same ways, using the
same certificates, across the HTTPS functionality in pmproxy(1), as well as the encrypted
PCP protocol functionality between pmcd, pmproxy and PMAPI client tools. Additionally,
the key-value server service used by pmseries(1) and pmproxy also exclusively uses
OpenSSL, and in a manner similar to PCP, which makes administering these services
significantly simpler.
SAR2PCP, IOSTAT2PCP
The sar2pcp(1) and iostat2pcp(1) utilities are deprecated, and will be retired in a future
version of PCP (v7). This is being replaced by native support for generating PCP archives
within the tools of the sysstat package (which provides sar itself, as well as the sadf
utility which produces PCP archives via the -l option).
PMLOGCONF-SETUP
Earlier versions of PCP (prior to v5.1.1) provided a shell script that was used internally
by pmlogconf(1), located in the PCP_BINADM_DIR directory, named pmlogconf-setup. This
script has been retired. The equivalent functionality remains available in the unlikely
event it should be needed via the -s or --setup option to pmlogconf(1).
The version 1 pmlogconf-setup configuration file format (from IRIX) was also retired in
this release, after more than 10 years of automatic transition to version 2 format by
pmlogconf.
PMMGR
The stand-alone PCP daemon manager pmmgr has been retired from PCP v5.2.0 onward. It was
phased out in favour of the simpler pmfind(1) service for setting up pmie(1) and
pmlogger(1) ``farms'' of discovered PCP collector systems with pmfind_check(1). The new
mechanisms, especially when integrated with systemd, require no additional daemons and are
better integrated with the pmie and pmlogger service management used elsewhere in PCP.
PCP-COLLECTL
The pcp-collectl utility has been superseded by pmrep(1) from PCP v5 onward.
The equivalent of pcp-collectl subsystem reporting is achieved as follows:
pmrep :collectl-sc
Processor subsystem view.
pmrep :collectl-sm
Memory subsystem view.
pmrep :collectl-sd
Aggregate disks view.
pmrep :collectl-sD
Per-disk-device view.
pmrep :collectl-dm-sD
Device mapper view.
pmrep :collectl-sn
Network subsystem view.
PCP-WEBAPPS
The stand-alone web applications packaged with older PCP versions have been superseded by
grafana-server(1) with the grafana-pcp plugin
https://github.com/performancecopilot/grafana-pcp.
This plugin provides an implementation of the Vector application, as well as data sources
for pmdabpftrace(1) (bpftrace(8) scripts) and pmseries(1) (fast, scalable, distributed
time series analysis).
PMWEBD
The pmwebd daemon has been superseded by pmproxy(1) from PCP v5 onward.
By default, pmproxy will now listen on both its original port (44322) and the PCP web API
port (44323) when the time series support is built.
pmproxy provides a compatible implementation of the live PMWEBAPI(3) interfaces used
traditionally by the Vector web application (see the ``PCP-WEBAPPS'' section). It also
provides extensions to the original pmwebd REST APIs (such as derived metrics, namespace
lookups and instance domain profiles), support for the HTTPS protocol, and fast, scalable
time series querying using the pmseries(1) REST API with a distributed key-value server
such as https://valkey.io/.
The partial Graphite API emulation provided by pmwebd has not been re-implemented -
applications wishing to use similar services could use the scalable time series REST APIs
described on PMWEBAPI(3).
SEE ALSO
pcp(1), pmcd(1), iostat2pcp(1), sar2pcp(1), pmrep(1), pmfind(1), pmfind_check(1),
pmlogconf(1), pmproxy(1), pmseries(1), pmdabpftrace(1), python(1), grafana-server(1),
mmv_stats_register(3), LOGIMPORT(3), PMAPI(3), PMDA(3) and PMWEBAPI(3).