path: root/INSTALL

== INSTALL ==

A.1 Linux Installation (rpm, deb)
 .2 Mac OS X Installation
 .3 AIX Installation
 .4 Solaris Installation
 .5 Windows Installation
B. Building from source
C. Post-install steps
D. Non-default build, install and run

This document describes how to configure and build the open source PCP
("pcp") package from source, and how to install and finally run it.

== A.1 Linux Installation

If you are using Debian, or a Debian-based distribution like Ubuntu,
PCP is included in the distribution (as of late 2008).  Run:
	# apt-get install pcp
If you are using a RPM based distribution and have the binary rpm:
	# rpm -Uvh pcp-*.rpm
... and skip to the final section (below) - "Post-install steps".

Special note for Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and 10.04

I've had to make the changes below to /usr/bin/dpkg-buildpackage.
Without these two changes, my pcp builds produce bad binaries with a
bizarre array of failure modes!

#kenj# my $default_flags = defined $build_opts->{noopt} ? "-g -O0" : "-g
-O2";
my $default_flags = defined $build_opts->{noopt} ? "-g -O0" : "-g -O0";
my %flags = ( CPPFLAGS => '',
              CFLAGS   => $default_flags,
              CXXFLAGS => $default_flags,
              FFLAGS   => $default_flags,
              #kenj# LDFLAGS  => '-Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions',
              LDFLAGS  => '',
    );

Without these changes, we see QA failures for 039, 061, 072, 091, 135,
147 and 151 ... and the QA 166 goes into a loop until it fills up the
root filesystem.

-- Ken

== A.2 Mac OS X Installation

The only unusual step in installing PCP on Mac OS X is the additional
dependency on the developer tools (XCode package).  The specific need
PCP has is to have a C preprocessor available for managing the metric
namespace, which on Mac OS X is a frontend to gcc and not installed by
default.

Once this is installed, installing PCP from the DMG file is as simple
as clicking on the icon in a Finder window, and following the prompts
from the installer.

== A.3 AIX Installation

At this stage, noone is making available pre-built AIX packages.
A port to AIX has been done, and merged, however - building from
the source is currently the only option.  The packaging work is also
begun on this platform (see the build/aix/ directory in the sources).

== A.4 Solaris Installation

Prebuild Solaris packages are available from PCP download section.

At this stage the package are distributed as SVR4 package datastream
and are build on Open Solaris 5.11.

You can install the package using 'pkgadd' command, e.g.:

	# pkgadd -d pcp-X.Y.Z

During the installation the following three services are registered
with the Solaris' service management facility:

	# svccfg list \*/pcp/\*
	application/pcp/pmcd
	application/pcp/pmlogger
	application/pcp/pmie
	application/pcp/pmproxy

On the new installation all services are disabled, during the upgrade
from the previous version of PCP the state of the services is
preserved.

Use of 'svcadm' command to enable or disable is preferred over explicit
invocation of the pmcd start script.

Use 'svcs' command to check the state of the services, e.g.:

	# svcs -l application/pcp/pcp
	fmri         svc:/application/pcp/pcp:default
	name         Performance Co-Pilot Collector Daemon
	enabled      false
	state        disabled
	next_state   none
	state_time   20 March 2012 11:33:27 AM EST
	restarter    svc:/system/svc/restarter:default
	dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/filesystem/local:default (online) svc:/milestone/network:default (online)

== A.5 Windows Installation

Download the native Windows version of PCP from the PCP download
section.  There are two variants: .zip and .exe.  The latter is
a self-installing executable, the former a simple compressed PCP
image.  Run the executable, follow the prompts, and a Startup
Menu item with several PCP options will be available - standard
DOS shell or POSIX shell (with suitable environment setup), the
Perl CPAN configuration tool, links to documentation and online
PCP internet resources, and the pmchart utility.

== B. Building from source

1. Configure, build and install the package

   The pcp package uses autoconf/configure and expects a GNU build
   environment (your platform must at least have gmake).

   If you just want to spin a .RPM, .DEB, .DMG, .EXE and/or tar
   file, use the Makepkgs script in the top level directory.
   This will configure and build the package for your platform and
   leave binary and src packages in the build/<pkg-type> directory.
   It will also leave binary and source tar file in the build/tar
   directory.

       $ ./Makepkgs --verbose

2. If you want to build the package and install it manually you will
   first need to ensure the "user" pcp is created so that key parts
   of the PCP installation can run as a user other than root.
   For Debian this means the following (equivalent commands are
   available on all distributions):

       $ su root
       # groupadd -r pcp
       # useradd -c "Performance Co-Pilot" -g pcp -d /var/lib/pcp -M -r -s /usr/sbin/nologin pcp
   	
   Then use the following steps (use configure options to suit your
   preferences, refer to the qa/admin/myconfigure script for some
   guidance and see also section D below for additional details):

       $ ./configure --prefix=/usr --libexecdir=/usr/lib --sysconfdir=/etc \
		     --localstatedir=/var --with-rcdir=/etc/init.d
       $ make
       $ su root
       # make install

   Note 0: PCP services run as non-root by default.  Create unprivileged
   users "pcp" with home directory /var/lib/pcp, and "pcpqa" with home
   directory such as /var/lib/pcp/testsuite, or as appropriate, or
   designate other userids in the pcp.conf file.
   Note 1: that there are so many "install" variants out there that we
   wrote our own script (see "install-sh" in the top level directory),
   which works on every platform supported by PCP.
   Note 2: the Windows build is particularly involved to setup, this
   is primarily due to build tools not being available by default on
   that platform.  See the PCP Glider scripts and notes in the pcpweb
   tree to configure your environment before attempting to build from
   source under Win32.

== C. Post-install steps

   You will need to start the PCP Collection Daemon (PMCD), as root:

   Linux, AIX:
   # service pmcd start  (or...)
   # /etc/init.d/pmcd start  (or...)
   # /etc/rc.d/init.d/pmcd start
   Mac OS X:
   # /Library/StartupItems/pcp/pmcd start
   Windows:
   $PCP_DIR/etc/pmcd start
   Solaris:
   # svcadm enable application/pcp/pmcd

   Once you have started the PMCD daemon, you can list all performance
   metrics using the pminfo(1) command, E.g.

   # pminfo -fmdt   (you don't have to be root for this, but you may need to
		     type rehash so your shell finds the pminfo command).

   If you are writing scripts, you may find the output from pmprobe(1)
   easier to parse than that for pminfo(1). There are numerous other
   PCP client tools included.

   PCP can be configured to automatically log certain performance metrics
   for one or more hosts. The scripts to do this are documented in
   pmlogger_check(1). By default this facility is not enabled. If you want
   to use it, you need to

   # determine which metrics to log and how often you need them
   # edit $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmlogger/control
   # edit $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmlogger/config.default
   # (and any others in same dir)
   # as root, "crontab -e" and add something like:

   # -- typical PCP log management crontab entries
   # daily processing of pmlogger archives and pmie logs
   10      0       *       *       *       $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmlogger_daily
   15      0       *       *       *       $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_daily
   #
   # every 30 minutes, check pmlogger and pmie instances are running
   25,40   *       *       *       *       $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmlogger_check
   5,55    *       *       *       *       $PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmie_check

   The pmie (Performance Metrics Inference Engine) daemon is _not_
   configured to start by default. To enable it, you may want to (on
   Linux platforms with chkconfig).

   # su root
   # chkconfig pmie on
   # edit the pmie control file (usually below $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmie)
   # edit the config file (usually $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmie/config.default)
   # set up cron scripts similar to those for pmlogger (see above)


   Configure some optional Performance Metrics Domain Agents (PMDAs)

   The default installation gives you the metrics for cpu, per-process,
   file system, swap, network, disk, memory, interrupts, nfs/rpc and
   others. These metrics are handled using the platform PMDA - namely
   pmda_linux.so (Linux), pmda_darwin.dylib (Mac), or pmda_windows.dll
   (Windows). It also gives you the PMCD PMDA, which contains metrics
   that monitor PCP itself.

   There are many other optional PMDAs that you can configure, depending
   on which performance metrics you need to monitor, as follows:
   Note: $PCP_PMDAS_DIR is normally /var/pcp/pmdas, see pcp.conf(4).

   Web Server metrics

   # su root
   # cd $PCP_PMDAS_DIR/apache  (i.e. cd /var/pcp/pmdas/apache)
   # ./Install
   # Check everything is working OK
   # pminfo -fmdt apache

   Other PMDAs in the pcp package include:

     apache - monitor apache web server stats
     cisco - monitor Cisco router stats
     dbping - query any database, extract response times
     elasticsearch - monitor an elasticsearch cluster
     kvm - monitor kernel-based virtual machine stats
     mailq - monitor the mail queue
     memcache - monitor memcache server stats
     mmv - export memory-mapped value stats from an application
     mounts - keep track of mounted file systems
     mysql - monitor MySQL relational databases
     postgres - monitor PostGreSQL relational databases
     process - keep an eye on critical processes/daemons
     roomtemp - monitor room temp (needs suitable probe)
     rsyslog - monitor the reliable system log daemon
     sendmail - monitor sendmail statistics
     shping - ping critical system services, extract response times
     trace - for instrumenting arbitrary applications, see pmtrace(1)
     txmon - transaction and QOS monitoring

     sample - for testing
     simple - example src code if you want to write a new PMDA
     trivial - even easier src code for a new PMDA.

   The procedure for configuring all of these is to change to the
   directory for the PMDA (usually below /var/lib/pcp/pmdas), and then
   run the ./Install script found therein. None of these PMDAs are
   configured by default - you choose the PMDAs you need and run the
   Install script.  Installation can be automated (defaults chosen) by
   touching .NeedInstall in the appropriate pmdas directory and then
   restarting the pmcd service via its startup script.

== D. Non-default build, install and run

   To run build and run a version of PCP that is installed in a private
   location (and does not require root privileges), first create the
   pcp "user" as described in section B.2 above), then

   $ ./configure --prefix=/some/path

   This will populate /some/path with a full PCP installation.  To use this 
   ensure the following are set in the environment:

   $ export PCP_DIR=/some/path

   Amend your shell's $PATH to include the PCP directories, found as
   follows:

   $ cd /some/path
   $ xtra=`grep '^PCP_BIN' etc/pcp.conf | sed -e 's/.*=//' | paste -s -d :`
   $ PATH=$xtra:$PATH

   Ensure the new libraries can be found:

   $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`grep '^PCP_LIB' etc/pcp.conf \
     | sed -e 's/.*=//' | uniq | paste -s -d :`

   Tell Perl where to find loadable modules:

   $ export PERL5LIB=$PCP_DIR/usr/lib/perl5:$PCP_DIR/usr/share/perl5

   Allow man(1) to find the PCP manual pages:

   $ export MANPATH=`manpath`:$PCP_DIR/usr/share/man

   If your version is co-exiting with a running PCP in a default
   install, then alternative port numbers in your environment for pmcd
   ($PMCD_PORT), pmlogger ($PMLOGGER_PORT) and pmproxy ($PMPROXY_PORT)