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).

PCP ENVIRONMENT

       Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the file and directory
       names used by PCP.  On each installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values
       for these variables.  The $PCP_CONF  variable  may  be  used  to  specify  an  alternative
       configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(5).

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).