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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CALLBACKS | CONFIGURATION | FILES | PCP ENVIRONMENT | COMPATIBILITY ISSUES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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PMLOGGER_DAILY(1) General Commands Manual PMLOGGER_DAILY(1)
pmlogger_daily - administration of Performance Co-Pilot archive
files
$PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmlogger_daily [-DEfKMNoPpQrRVzZ?] [-c control]
[-k time] [-l logfile] [-m addresses] [-s size] [-t want] [-x
time] [-X program] [-Y regex]
pmlogger_daily and the related pmlogger_check(1) tools along with
associated control files (see pmlogger.control(5)) may be used to
create a customized regime of administration and management for
historical archives of performance data within the Performance Co-
Pilot (see PCPIntro(1)) infrastructure.
pmlogger_daily is intended to be run once per day, preferably in
the early morning, as soon after midnight as practicable. Its
task is to aggregate, rotate and perform general housekeeping one
or more sets of PCP archives.
To accommodate the evolution of PMDAs and changes in production
logging environments, pmlogger_daily is integrated with
pmlogrewrite(1) to allow optional and automatic rewriting of
archives before merging. If there are global rewriting rules to
be applied across all archives mentioned in the control file(s),
then create the directory $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmlogrewrite and place
any pmlogrewrite(1) rewriting rules in this directory. For
rewriting rules that are specific to only one family of archives,
use the directory name from the control file(s) - i.e. the fourth
field - and create a file, or a directory, or a symbolic link
named pmlogrewrite within this directory and place the required
rewriting rule(s) in the pmlogrewrite file or in files within the
pmlogrewrite subdirectory. pmlogger_daily will choose rewriting
rules from the archive directory if they exist, else rewriting
rules from $PCP_SYSCONF_DIR/pmlogrewrite if that directory exists,
else no rewriting is attempted.
As an alternate mechanism, if the file
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/.NeedRewrite exists when pmlogger_daily
starts then this is treated the same as specifying -R on the
command line and $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/.NeedRewrite will be
removed once all the rewriting has been done.
-c control, --control=control
Both pmlogger_daily and pmlogger_check(1) are controlled by
PCP logger control file(s) that specifies the pmlogger(1)
instances to be managed. The default control file is
$PCP_PMLOGGERCONTROL_PATH, but an alternate may be specified
using the -c option. If the directory
$PCP_PMLOGGERCONTROL_PATH.d (or control.d from the -c option)
exists, then the contents of any additional control files
therein will be appended to the main control file (which must
exist).
-D, --noreport
Do not perform the conditional pmlogger_daily_report(1)
processing as described below.
-E, --expunge
This option causes pmlogger_daily to pass the -E flag to
pmlogger_merge(1) in order to expunge metrics with metadata
inconsistencies and continue rather than fail. This is
intended for automated daily archive rotation where it is
highly desirable for unattended daily archive merging,
rewriting and compression to succeed. For further details,
see pmlogger_merge(1) and description for the -x flag in
pmlogextract(1).
-f, --force
This option forces pmlogger_daily to attempt compression
actions. Using this option in production is not recommended.
-k time, --discard=time
After some period, old PCP archives are discarded. time is a
time specification in the syntax of find-filter(1), so
DD[:HH[:MM]]. The optional HH (hours) and MM (minutes) parts
are 0 if not specified. By default the time is 14:0:0 or 14
days, but may be changed using this option.
Some special values are recognized for the time, namely 0 to
keep no archives beyond the the ones being currently written
by pmlogger(1), and forever or never to prevent any archives
being discarded.
The time can also be set using the $PCP_CULLAFTER variable,
set in either the environment or in a control file. If both
$PCP_CULLAFTER and -k specify different values for time then
the environment variable value is used and a warning is
issued, i.e. if $PCP_CULLAFTER is set in the control file, it
overrides -k given on the command line.
Note that the semantics of time are that it is measured from
the time of last modification of each archive, and not from
the original archive creation date. This has subtle
implications for compression (see below) - the compression
process results in the creation of new archive files which
have new modification times. In this case, the time period
(re)starts from the time of compression.
-K When this option is specified for pmlogger_daily then only
the compression tasks are attempted, so no pmlogger rotation,
no culling, no rewriting, etc. When -K is used and a period
of 0 is in effect (from -x on the command line or
$PCP_COMPRESSAFTER in the environment or via the control
file) this is intended for environments where compression of
archives is desired before the scheduled daily processing
happens. To achieve this, once pmlogger_check(1) has
completed regular processing, it calls pmlogger_daily with
just the -K option. Provided $PCP_COMPRESSAFTER is set to 0
along with any other required compression options to match
the scheduled invocation of pmlogger_daily, then this will
compress all volumes except the ones being currently written
by pmlogger(1). If $PCP_COMPRESSAFTER is set to a value
greater than zero, then manually running pmlogger_daily with
the -x option may be used to compress volumes that are
younger than the $PCP_COMPRESSAFTER time. This may be used
to reclaim filesystem space by compressing volumes earlier
than they would have otherwise been compressed. Note that
since the default value of $PCP_COMPRESSAFTER is 0 days, the
-x option has no effect unless the control file has been
edited and $PCP_COMPRESSAFTER has been set to a value greater
than 0.
The default value of $PCP_COMPRESSAFTER is 0 if zstd(1) is
installed, or if xz(1) is installed and the lzma library is
available (as reported for the transparent_decompress option
by pmconfig(1)). Otherwise the default value of
$PCP_COMPRESSAFTER is never.
-l file, --logfile=file
In order to ensure that mail is not unintentionally sent when
these scripts are run from cron(8) or systemd(1) diagnostics
are always sent to log files. By default, this file is
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/pmlogger_daily.log but this can be
changed using the -l option. If this log file already exists
when the script starts, it will be renamed with a .prev
suffix (overwriting any log file saved earlier) before
diagnostics are generated to the log file. The -l and -t
options cannot be used together.
-m addresses, --mail=addresses
Use of this option causes pmlogger_daily to construct a
summary of the ``notices'' file entries which were generated
in the last 24 hours, and e-mail that summary to the set of
space-separated addresses. This daily summary is stored in
the file $PCP_LOG_DIR/NOTICES.daily, which will be empty when
no new ``notices'' entries were made in the previous 24 hour
period.
-M This option may be used to disable archive merging (or
renaming) and rewriting (-M implies -r). This is most useful
in cases where the archives are being incrementally copied to
a remote repository, e.g. using rsync(1). Merging, renaming
and rewriting all risk an increase in the synchronization
load, especially immediately after pmlogger_daily has run, so
-M may be useful in these cases.
-N, --showme
This option enables a ``show me'' mode, where the programs
actions are echoed, but not executed, in the style of ``make
-n''. Using -N in conjunction with -V maximizes the
diagnostic capabilities for debugging.
-o By default all possible archives will be merged. This option
reinstates the old behaviour in which only yesterday's
archives will be considered as merge candidates. In the
special case where only a single input archive needs to be
merged, pmlogmv(1) is used to rename the archive, otherwise
pmlogger_merge(1) is used to merge all of the archives for a
single host and a single day into a new PCP archive and the
individual archives are removed.
-P, --noproxy
By default, in addition to the archives created by local
pmlogger(1) instances below the $PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/<hostname>
directories pmlogger_daily will also process the archives
that have been ``pushed'' from a remote pmlogger(1) via the
local pmproxy(1) and stored below the
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmproxy/<hostname> directories. The -P option
prevents the processing of the archives from pmproxy(1).
-p If this option is specified for pmlogger_daily then the
status of the daily processing is polled and if the daily
pmlogger(1) rotation, culling, rewriting, compressing, etc.
has not been done in the last 24 hours then it is done now.
The intent is to have pmlogger_daily called regularly with
the -p option (at 30 mins past the hour, every hour in the
default cron(8) set up) to ensure daily processing happens as
soon as possible if it was missed at the regularly scheduled
time (which is 00:10 by default), e.g. if the system was down
or suspended at that time. With this option pmlogger_daily
simply exits if the previous day's processing has already
been done. Note that this option is not used on platforms
supporting systemd(1) because the pmlogger_daily.timer
service unit specifies a timer setting with Persistent=true.
The -K and -p options to pmlogger_daily are mutually
exclusive.
-Q, --proxyonly
The inverse of -P descibed above, namely only process the
archives that have been ``pushed'' from a remote pmlogger(1)
via the local pmproxy(1) and ignore all archives created by
local pmlogger(1) instances below the
$PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/<hostname> directories.
-r, --norewrite
This command line option acts as an override and prevents all
archive rewriting with pmlogrewrite(1) independent of the
presence of any rewriting rule files or directories.
-R, --rewriteall
Sometimes PMDA changes require all archives to be rewritten,
not just the ones involved in any current merging. This is
required for example after a PCP upgrade where a new version
of an existing PMDA has revised metadata. The -R command
line forces this universal-style of rewriting. The -R option
to pmlogger_daily is mutually exclusive with both the -r and
-M options.
-s size, --rotate=size
If the PCP ``notices'' file ($PCP_LOG_DIR/NOTICES) is larger
than 20480 bytes, pmlogger_daily will rename the file with a
``.old'' suffix, and start a new ``notices'' file. The
rotate threshold may be changed from 20480 to size bytes
using the -s option.
-t period
To assist with debugging or diagnosing intermittent failures
the -t option may be used. This will turn on very verbose
tracing (-VV) and capture the trace output in a file named
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/daily.datestamp.trace, where datestamp
is the time pmlogger_daily was run in the format
YYYYMMDD.HH.MM. In addition, the period argument will ensure
that trace files created with -t will be kept for period days
and then discarded.
-V, --verbose
The output from the cron(8) execution of the scripts may be
extended using the -V option to the scripts which will enable
verbose tracing of their activity. By default the scripts
generate no output unless some error or warning condition is
encountered. A second -V increases the verbosity. Using -N
in conjunction with -V maximizes the diagnostic capabilities
for debugging.
-x time, --compress-after=time
Archive data files can optionally be compressed after some
period to conserve disk space. This is particularly useful
for large numbers of pmlogger(1) processes under the control
of pmlogger_daily.
time is a time specification in the syntax of find-filter(1),
so DD[:HH[:MM]]. The optional HH (hours) and MM (minutes)
parts are 0 if not specified.
Some special values are recognized for the time, namely 0 to
apply compression as soon as possible, and forever or never
to prevent any compression being done.
If transparent_decompress is enabled when libpcp was built
(can be checked with the pmconfig(1) -L option), then the
default behaviour is compression ``as soon as possible''.
Otherwise the default behaviour is to not compress files
(which matches the historical default behaviour in earlier
PCP releases).
The time can also be set using the $PCP_COMPRESSAFTER
variable, set in either the environment or in a control file.
If both $PCP_COMPRESSAFTER and -x specify different values
for time then the environment variable value is used and a
warning is issued. For important other detailed notes
concerning volume compression, see the -K and -k options
(above).
-X program, --compressor=program
This option specifies the program to use for compression - by
default this is pmlogcompress(1). The environment variable
$PCP_COMPRESS may be used as an alternative mechanism to
define program. If both $PCP_COMPRESS and -X specify
different compression programs then the environment variable
value is used and a warning is issued.
-Y regex, --regex=regex
This option allows a regular expression to be specified
causing files in the set of files matched for compression to
be omitted - this allows only the data file to be compressed,
and also prevents the program from attempting to compress it
more than once. The default regex is
"\.(index|Z|gz|bz2|zip|xz|lzma|lzo|lz4|zst)$"
- such files are filtered using the -v option to egrep(1).
The environment variable $PCP_COMPRESSREGEX may be used as an
alternative mechanism to define regex. If both
$PCP_COMPRESSREGEX and -Y specify different values for regex
then the environment variable value is used and a warning is
issued.
-z This option causes pmlogger_daily to not ``re-exec'', see
pmlogger(1), when it would otherwise choose to do so and is
intended only for QA testing.
-Z This option causes pmlogger_daily to ``re-exec'', see
pmlogger(1), whenever that is possible and is intended only
for QA testing.
-?, --help
Display usage message and exit.
Additionally pmlogger_daily supports the following ``hooks'' to
allow auxiliary operations to be performed at key points in the
daily processing of the archives. These callbacks are controlled
via variables that may be set in the environment or via the
control file.
Note that merge callbacks and autosaving described below are not
enabled when only compression tasks are being attempted, i.e. when
-K command line option is used.
All of the callback script execution and the autosave file moving
will be executed as the non-privileged user ``pcp'' and group
``pcp'', so appropriate permissions may need to have been set up
in advance.
$PCP_MERGE_CALLBACK
As each day's archive is created by merging and before any
compression takes place, if $PCP_MERGE_CALLBACK is defined,
then it is assumed to be a script that will be called with
one argument being the name of the archive (stripped of any
suffixes), so something of the form
/some/directory/path/YYYYMMDD. The script needs to be either
a full pathname, or something that will be found on the
shell's $PATH . The callback script will be run in the
foreground, so pmlogger_daily will wait for it to complete.
If the control file contains more than one
$PCP_MERGE_CALLBACK specification then these will be run
serially in the order they appear in the control file. If
$PCP_MERGE_CALLBACK is defined in the environment when
pmlogger_daily is run, this is treated as though this option
was the first in the control file, i.e. it will be run before
any merge callbacks mentioned in the control file.
If the pcp-zeroconf packages is installed, then a special
merge callback is added to call pmlogger_daily_report(1)
first, before any other merge callback options, but only for
the primary pmlogger(1) instance. Refer to
pmlogger_daily_report(1) for an explanation of the pcp-
zeroconf requirements.
If pmlogger_daily is in ``catch up'' mode (more than one
day's worth of archives need to be combined) then each call
back is executed once for each day's archive that is
generated.
A typical use might be to produce daily reports from the PCP
archive which needs to wait until the archive has been
created, but is more efficient if it is done before any
potential compression of the archive.
$PCP_COMPRESS_CALLBACK
If pmlogger_daily is run with -x 0 or $PCP_COMPRESSAFTER=0,
then compression is done immediately after merging. As each
day's archive is compressed, if $PCP_COMPRESS_CALLBACK is
defined, then it is assumed to be a script that will be
called with one argument being the name of the archive
(stripped of any suffixes), so something of the form
/some/directory/path/YYYYMMDD. The script needs to be either
a full pathname, or something that will be found on the
shell's $PATH . The callback script will be run in the
foreground, so pmlogger_daily will wait for it to complete.
If the control file contains more than one
$PCP_COMPRESS_CALLBACK specification then these will be run
serially in the order they appear in the control file. If
$PCP_COMPRESS_CALLBACK is defined in the environment when
pmlogger_daily is run, this is treated as though this option
was the first in the control file, i.e. it will be run first.
If pmlogger_daily is in ``catch up'' mode (more than one
day's worth of archives need to be compressed) then each call
back is executed once for each day's archive that is
compressed.
A typical use might be to keep recent archives in
uncompressed form for efficient querying, but move the older
archives to some other storage location once the compression
has been done.
$PCP_AUTOSAVE_DIR
Once the merging and possible compression has been done by
pmlogger_daily, if $PCP_AUTOSAVE_DIR is defined then all of
the physical files that make up one day's archive will be
moved (autosaved) to the directory specified by
$PCP_AUTOSAVE_DIR.
The basename of the archive is used to set the reserved words
DATEYYYY (year), DATEMM (month) and DATEDD (day) and these
(along with LOCALHOSTNAME) may appear literally in
$PCP_AUTOSAVE_DIR, and will be substituted at execution time
to generate the destination directory name. For example:
$PCP_AUTOSAVE_DIR=/gpfs/LOCALHOSTNAME/DATEYYYY/DATEMM-
DATEDD
Note that these ``date'' reserved words correspond to the
date on which the archive data was collected, not the date
that pmlogger_daily was run.
If $PCP_AUTOSAVE_DIR (after LOCALHOSTNAME and ``date''
substitution) does not exist then pmlogger_daily will attempt
to create it (along with any parent directories that do not
exist). Just be aware that this directory creation runs
under the uid of the user ``pcp'', so directories along the
path to $PCP_AUTOSAVE_DIR may need to be writeable by this
non-root user.
By ``move'' the archives we mean a paranoid checksum-copy-
checksum-remove (using the -c option for pmlogmv(1)) that
will bail if the copy fails or the checksums do not match
(the archives are important so we cannot risk something like
a full filesystem or a permissions issue messing with the
copy process).
If pmlogger_daily is in ``catch up'' mode (more than one
day's worth of archives need to be combined) then the
archives for more than one day could be copied in this step.
A typical use might be to create PCP archives on a local
filesystem initially, then once all the data for a single day
has been collected and merged, migrate that day's archive to
a shared filesystem or a remote filesystem. This may allow
automatic backup to off-site storage and/or reduce the number
of I/O operations and filesystem metadata operations on the
(potentially slower) non-local filesystem.
Refer to pmlogger.control(5) for a description of the contol
file(s) that are used to control which pmlogger(1) instances and
which archives are managed by pmlogger_check(1) and
pmlogger_daily.
Additionally, when pmproxy(1) archives are being processed,
environment variables like $PCP_CULLAFTER or $PCP_COMPRESSAFTER
can be set either for all remote hosts via the file
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmproxy/control and/or per-host via files named
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmproxy/<hostname>/control.
$PCP_VAR_DIR/config/pmlogger/config.default
default pmlogger(1) configuration file location for the local
primary logger, typically generated automatically by
pmlogconf(1).
$PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/<hostname>
default location for archives of performance information
collected from the host hostname
$PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/<hostname>/lock
transient lock file to guarantee mutual exclusion during
pmlogger(1) administration for the host hostname - if
present, can be safely removed if neither pmlogger_daily nor
pmlogger_check(1) are running
$PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/<hostname>/Latest
PCP archive folio created by mkaf(1) for the most recently
launched archive containing performance metrics from the host
hostname
$PCP_LOG_DIR/NOTICES
PCP ``notices'' file used by pmie(1) and friends
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/pmlogger_daily.log
if the previous execution of pmlogger_daily produced any
output it is saved here. The normal case is no output in
which case the file does not exist.
$PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/SaveLogs
if this directory exists, then the log file from the -l
argument for pmlogger_daily will be saved in this directory
with the name of the format <date>-pmlogger_daily.log.<pid>
or <date>-pmlogger_daily-K.log.<pid> This allows the log
file to be inspected at a later time, even if several
pmlogger_daily executions have been launched in the interim.
Because the PCP archive management tools run under the
$PCP_USER account ``pcp'', $PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/SaveLogs
typically needs to be owned by the user ``pcp''.
$PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/<hostname>/SaveLogs
if this directory exists, then the log file from the -l
argument of a newly launched pmlogger(1) for hostname will
be saved in this directory with the name archive.log where
archive is the basename of the associated pmlogger(1) PCP
archive files. This allows the log file to be inspected at
a later time, even if several pmlogger(1) instances for
hostname have been launched in the interim. Because the
PCP archive management tools run under the uid of the user
``pcp'', $PCP_ARCHIVE_DIR/<hostname>/SaveLogs typically
needs to be owned by the user ``pcp''.
$PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/.NeedRewrite
if this file exists, then this is treated as equivalent to
using -R on the command line and the file will be removed
once all rewriting has been done.
Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to
parameterize the file and directory names used by PCP. On each
installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for
these variables. The $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an
alternative configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(5).
Earlier versions of pmlogger_daily used find(1) to locate files
for compressing or culling and the -k and -x options took only
integer values to mean ``days''. The semantics of this was quite
loose given that find(1) offers different precision and semantics
across platforms.
The current implementation of pmlogger_daily uses find-filter(1)
which provides high precision intervals and semantics that are
relative to the time of execution and are consistent across
platforms.
PCPIntro(1), egrep(1), find-filter(1), pmconfig(1), pmlc(1),
pmlogcompress(1), pmlogconf(1), pmlogctl(1), pmlogextract(1),
pmlogger(1), pmlogger_check(1), pmlogger_daily_report(1),
pmlogger_merge(1), pmlogmv(1), pmlogrewrite(1), pmproxy(1),
systemd(1), xz(1), zstd(1) and cron(8).
This page is part of the PCP (Performance Co-Pilot) project.
Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.pcp.io/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual
page, send it to [email protected]. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/performancecopilot/pcp.git⟩ on 2025-08-11.
(At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found
in the repository was 2025-08-11.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
Performance Co-Pilot PCP PMLOGGER_DAILY(1)
Pages that refer to this page: find-filter(1), pcp-atop(1), pcp-atopsar(1), pcpintro(1), pmlc(1), pmlogcompress(1), pmlogctl(1), pmlogdump(1), pmlogextract(1), pmlogger(1), pmlogger_check(1), pmlogger_daily_report(1), pmlogger_merge(1), pmlogger_rewrite(1), pmloglabel(1), pmsearch(1), pmsnap(1), pmdiscoversetup(3), LOGARCHIVE(5), pmlogger.control(5)
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