pmseries displays various types of information about performance
metrics available through the scalable timeseries facilities of
the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) and the Redis distributed data
store.
By default pmseries communicates with a local redis-server(1),
however the -h and -p options can be used to specify an alternate
Redis instance. If this instance is a node of a Redis cluster,
all other instances in the cluster will be discovered and used
automatically.
pmseries runs in several different modes - either querying
timeseries identifiers, metadata or values (already stored in
Redis), or manually loading timeseries into Redis. The latter
mode is seldom used, however, since pmproxy(1) will automatically
perform this function for local pmlogger(1) instances, when
running in its default time series mode.
Without command line options specifying otherwise, pmseries will
issue a timeseries query to find matching timeseries and values.
All timeseries are identified using a unique SHA-1 hash which is
always displayed in a 40-hexdigit human readable form. These
hashes are formed using the metadata associated with every
metric.
Importantly, this includes all metric metadata (labels, names,
descriptors). Metric labels in particular are (as far as
possible) unique for every machine - on Linux for example the
labels associated with every metric include the unique
/etc/machine-id, the hostname, domainname, and other
automatically generated machine labels, as well as any
administrator-defined labels from /etc/pcp/labels. These labels
can be reported with pminfo(1) and the pmcd.labels metric.
See pmLookupLabels(3), pmLookupInDom(3), pmLookupName(3) and
pmLookupDesc(3) for detailed information about metric labels and
other metric metadata used in each timeseries identifier hash
calculation.
The timeseries identifiers provide a higher level (and machine
independent) identifier than the traditional PCP performance
metric identifiers (pmID), instance domain identifiers (pmInDom)
and metric names. See PCPIntro(1) for more details about these
traditional identifiers. However, pmseries uses timeseries
identifiers in much the same way that pminfo(1) uses the lower
level indom, metric identifiers and metric names.
The default mode of pmseries operation (i.e. with no command line
options) depends on the arguments it is presented. If all non-
option arguments appear to be timeseries identifiers (in 40 hex
digit form) pmseries will report metadata for these timeseries -
refer to the -a option for details. Otherwise, the parameters
will be treated as a timeseries query.
