pmdiff(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | FILES | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PMDIFF(1)                General Commands Manual               PMDIFF(1)

NAME         top

       pmdiff - compares archives and report significant differences

SYNOPSIS         top

       pmdiff [-dzV?]  [-B starttime] [-E endtime] [-p precision] [-q
       thres] [-S starttime] [--skip-excluded] [--skip-missing] [-T
       endtime] [-x metric] [-X file] [-Z timezone] archive1 [archive2]

DESCRIPTION         top

       pmdiff compares the average values for every metric in either one
       or two sets of archives, in a given time window, for changes that
       are likely to be of interest when searching for performance
       regressions.

       The archive specifiers archive1 and archive2 may be comma-
       separated lists of names, each of which may be the base name of
       an archive or the name of a directory containing one or more
       archives. Each archive in the resulting set of archives must have
       been previously created using pmlogger(1).  The pmlogsummary(1)
       utility is used to obtain the average values used for comparison.

       There are two sorts of invocation of the tool: with either one or
       two sets of archives.

       In the first case, the only sensible command line requires use of
       all four time window arguments.  These are specified using the
       same time window format described in PCPIntro(1), and are
       -S/--start and -T/--finish for the start and end times of the
       first time window of interest in the archive set, and -B/--before
       and -E/--end for the start and end times of the second time
       window of interest.

       In the second case, with two sets of archives, the -B/--before
       and -E/--end options might be unnecessary.  This might be the
       case, for example, when comparing the same time window of two
       consecutive days (usually two separate sets of archives), or a
       time window on the same day of different weeks.

       In either case, pmdiff produces a sorted summary of those metrics
       in the specified window whose values have deviated the most from
       a minimal threshold.  The level of deviation is calculated by
       dividing the average value of each metric in both logs, and then
       calculating whether the ratio falls outside of a range considered
       normal.  This ratio can be adjusted using the -q/--threshold
       option, and by default it is 2 (i.e. report all metrics with
       average values that have more than doubled in the two time
       windows or more than halved in the two time windows).

       If the baseline value is zero and the comparison value is non-
       zero, the ratio is reported as ``|+|'' (infinitely large).  If
       the comparison value is zero and the baseline value is non-zero,
       the ratio is reported as ``|-|'' (infinitely small).

       Reported metrics are sorted in ascending ratio order.

       Should any metrics be present in one window but missing from the
       other, a diagnostic will be displayed listing each missing metric
       and the archive set from which it was missing.

       Metrics with counter semantics are converted to rates before
       being evaluated.

OPTIONS         top

       The available command line options are:

       -d, --keep
            Debug mode, keep intermediate files.

       -B time, --begin=time
            Start time for the second time window.

       -E time, --end=time
            End time for the second time window.

       -p precision, --precision=precision
            Print all floating point numbers with precision digits after
            the decimal place.

       -q threshold, --threshold=threshold
            Change the threshold for interesting metrics, see above for
            more details.

       -S time, --start=time
            Start time of the first time window.

       -T time, --finish=time
            End time of the first time window.

       -V, --version
            Display version number and exit.

       -x metric
            Compare each metric in each archive set in the time windows
            specified to a given egrep(1) pattern, excluding those that
            match from the report output.

       -X file
            Allows a file to be specified which containing egrep(1)
            patterns which are applied to the metric names to optionally
            exclude some from the report.

       -z, --hostzone
            Use the local timezone from the given archive set.

       -Z timezone, --timezone=timezone
            Changes the timezone in the archive labels to timezone in
            the format of the environment variable TZ as described in
            environ(7).

       -?, --help
            Display usage message and exit.

       --skip-excluded
            Cull the list of names of metrics being excluded from the
            output.

       --skip-missing
            By default, pmdiff will report the names of any metrics that
            are in one archive set but not the other.  This option
            suppresses that reporting.

FILES         top

       $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/<hostname>
            Default directory for PCP archives containing performance
            metric values collected from the host hostname.

PCP ENVIRONMENT         top

       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).

SEE ALSO         top

       PCPIntro(1), pmlogger(1), pmlogsummary(1), egrep(1), pcp.conf(5)
       and pcp.env(5).

COLOPHON         top

       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 2024-06-14.
       (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found
       in the repository was 2024-06-14.)  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                         PMDIFF(1)

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