Overview

The PCP Charts tool, pmchart, is a stripchart tool for graphically displaying changes in the values of performance metric values available through the facilities of the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP). Metric values can be sourced from one or more live hosts (simultaneously). Alternatively, one or more PCP archives can be used as a source of historical data. See the PCP Introduction for an in-depth discussion of the capabilities of the PCP framework, many of which are used by pmchart.

Many aspects of the behaviour of pmchart can be customised through the interface. The use of Views allows predefined sets of metrics and charting parameters like colors, scaling, titles, legends, and so on to be stored for later use, or use with different hosts and archives.

In addition, the Preferences dialog allows customisations to the rest of the pmchart user interface to be saved and restored between different invocations of the tool. This allows the default background color, highlight color, contents and location of the toolbar, and many other aspects to be configured.

pmchart makes extensive use of the pmtime utility for time control, refer to the pmtime manual pages for further details of its operation.