Performance Co-Pilot (also known as PCP) is an open source software infrastructure for monitoring, visualizing, recording, responding to, and controlling the status, activity, and performance of networks, computers, applications, and servers.

Features

The following features are provided by the Performance Co-Pilot: * Runs on many

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

variants, as well as

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

. * Has a fully distributed architecture; any client may interact with any instrumented server or application. * Has a plug-in architecture for instrumenting any custom application or server. * Can query hundreds of operational measurements from operating systems,

Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño an ...

Sendmail Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet. A descendant of the ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

, the Java VM,

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

, KVM, etc. * Can send operational parameters to remote processes, to change their behavior (cf.

computational steering Computational steering is the practice of manually intervening with an otherwise autonomous computational process, to change its outcome. The term is commonly used within the numerical simulation community, where it more specifically refers to the ...

). * Can query or send any type of value, including: integers, strings, floating point numbers, and arbitrary composite data structures. * Has a communication protocol designed to minimize consumption of network bandwidth.

History

Performance Co-Pilot was originally created by SGI as a

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and int ...

product, exclusively for SGI customers. PCP's initial design was done at SGI in Melbourne, Australia, by Ken McDonell and Mark Goodwin, starting in October 1993. The pair were joined by Seppo Keronen and Jonathan Knispel, early in 1994. These four produced the initial version of Performance Co-Pilot 1.0, which was released in April 1995 as add-on software for SGI's

IRIX IRIX ( ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system and ...

operating system. Components included in that initial release were: (Ken and Jonathan), (Mark), (Ken), (Seppo), (Jonathan), and a host of other smaller bits and pieces. Other significant early contributors were Ania Bodeit, David Chatterton (), Ivan Rayner, Nathan Scott and Tim Shimmin. In 2000, the core of PCP was re-released as

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

, under the

GNU LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

. Additional proprietary components have been re-released as free software since then. Currently an active community of contributors is enhancing the open source distribution of PCP and releasing new tools built upon it. Netflix built Vector.io which used PCP. This has been modified to being a

Grafana Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. A licensed Grafana Enterprise version with additional ...

data source which will be integrated into mainline PCP.

References

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External links

Performance Co-Pilot
official website

Free network-related software

Features

History

See also

References

External links