NAME

       sar2pcp - Import sar data and create a PCP archive

SYNOPSIS

       sar2pcp infile outfile

DESCRIPTION

       sar2pcp is intended to read a binary System Activity Reporting (sar) data file as created
       by sadc(1) (infile) and translate this into a Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) archive with the
       basename outfile.

       However, if infile has the suffix ".xml", then it will be considered already in XML format
       and sar2pcp will operate directly on it.

       The resultant PCP achive may be used with all the PCP client tools to graph subsets of the
       data using pmchart(1), perform data reduction and reporting, filter with the PCP inference
       engine pmie(1), etc.

       A series of physical files will be created with the prefix outfile.  These are outfile.0
       (the performance data), outfile.meta (the metadata that describes the performance data)
       and outfile.index (a temporal index to improve efficiency of replay operations for the
       archive).  If any of these files exists already, then sar2pcp will not overwrite them and
       will exit with an error message of the form

       __pmLogNewFile: "blah.0" already exists, not over-written

       sar2pcp is a Perl script that uses the PCP::LogImport Perl wrapper around the PCP
       libpcp_import library, and as such could be used as an example to develop new tools to
       import other types of performance data and create PCP archives.  A Python wrapper module
       is also available.

CAVEATS

       When not using the XML input option, sar2pcp requires infile to have been created by a
       version of sadc(1) from <http://sebastien.godard.pagesperso-orange.fr/> which includes the
       sadf(1) utility to translate infile into an XML stream (any since version 6); sar2pcp will
       automatically run sadf(1) and translate the resultant XML into a PCP archive.

       When using binary sadc files it is important to ensure the installed sadf is compatible
       with the version of sadc that originally generated the binary files.  Simply assuming a
       newer installed version will work is unfortunately far too optimistic, and nor should one
       assume that binary data from different platforms (e.g. different endianness) will work -
       these issues are due to limitations in sadc and sadf, and not in sar2pcp itself.

       Fortunately, the sadf message indicating that an incompatibility has been detected is
       consistent across versions, and is always prefixed

       Invalid system activity file

       Using an XML infile has the advantage that the installed version of sadf is completely
       bypassed.  sar2pcp undertakes to transform any valid XML produced by any of the different
       variations of sadf into a valid PCP archive.  Any version of PCP will be able to interpret
       the archive files produced by any version of sar2pcp, and you are also free to move the
       binary PCP archive between different platforms, different hardware, even different
       operating systems - it Just Works (TM).

SEE ALSO

       pmie(1), pmchart(1), pmlogger(1), pmlogextract(1), pmlogsummary(1), sadc(1), sadf(1),
       sar(1), Date::Parse(3pm), Date::Format(3pm), PCP::LogImport(3pm), XML::TokeParser(3pm) and
       LOGIMPORT(3).