Perfomance Co-Pilot Viewer

What is it?

pcpViewer is a 3D viewer of data gathered through the excellent "Performance Co-Pilot" library (http://oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp). You can see usage of CPU time, net devices, memory, hard drives, and virtually any data exported by the pcp library and daemon.
I first started this "pet project" as a 3D xosview replacement (thanks for inspiration), so one of the goal is to get the same level of responsiveness as xosview.

Pre-requisite

You NEED to install the Performance Co-Pilot library from SGI to compile this software, so have a look at: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp/

You NEED an OpenInventor implementation too, so either choose the reference implementation at : http://oss.sgi.com/projects/openinventor/ Or prefer the Coin implementation at : http://www.coin3d.org/

You NEED the toolkit hanlder for OpenInventor: SoQt, SoXt, SoGtk... See http://www.coin3d.org/

Compiling

Get-it at : http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcpview/

Run configure with the necessary option to choose your toolkit, i.e. for Qt:

  
	./configure --with-soqt

Or for Motif :

  
	./configure --with-soxt

Run make.
Enjoy.

Usage

pcpview will not be installed via make install. I don't consider it mature enough to let you have this silly idea ;-).
However, there are no dependencies, nor documentation or man files for the moment, so the only thing you need to do is copying the COMPILATION_DIR/src/pcpview binary in your path.

I've added the "-h" option to specify a remote host, so by running:

	pcpview

you'll get a graph presenting localhost performance data. If you run:

	pcpview -h remotehost

you'll get a graph of performance data on remotehost (assuming pmcd run on remotehost).

Tell me what you think about pcpviewer

Users, i need you!!! To make pcpviewer the best for you, i need you valuable input. Want some new feature? Do you have problem with pcpviewer? Do you want to help?

Go to sourceforge forums and let me hear your voice ;-)

For usage, compilation problems : pcpviewer Help forum
For feature request or general discussions: pcpviewer Open Discussion forum
For developers: pcpviewer Developers forum

Tips and tricks

To see all metrics exported by your pcp daemon:

	pminfo

To see value of a specific metric:

  
	pminfo -f metricname   (ex: hinv.cpu.clock)

Is that all ?

As you will notice, pcpview is actually not much more than a 3D Xosview, but i think that there is really potential. The pcp library export a vast number of metrics from a system, so many other data could be used. Another thing: pcp can be accessed remotly, meaning that we could create a system to gather data from many hosts without having the application running everywhere (still the pcp daemon that actually is not satisfying on security look). My short term plan (6 month) are:

Config file!!! Will permit to choose a remote host and arbitratry pcp metrics
Possibility to choose between bargraph or graphs
Better handling of texts when zooming out (quite done...)
Better handling of positioning
Auto scaling of values
Specific sensors for standard metrics (CPU, mem, netdev, disk...)

Medium term plan:

Get any data from any host running pcp
Graph customization: ex, get CPUs of all host in a cluster on the same graph
Muliple graphs with "auto-zooming" function
navigator of pcp metrics to choose what to add to a graph
"Text sensors" for displaying text metrics

Long term plan:

Support for other sources of data (SNMP, WBEM...)
Xinerama handling
PCP archives support: replay any metrics, aka VCR like with ffw, rwd...

Want to help ?

Hey, it's OSS, so first of all feel free to play with it like i did... However i would greatly appreciate your help as i hadn't coded c++ since 7 years before starting this projects. I know that debuging in it is actually an HORROR, and there are many things do do and improve,cd so getting help from a better c++ coder would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to contact me (o_dot_tarnus__at__free_dot_fr) if you would like to participate.

Sorry for my english, i am french...