Using Performance Co-Pilot to Monitor SNMP Devices

• Origins of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP): Frustration with SNMP.
• Started by SGI.
• Top does not scale.
• Open source toolkit for system level performance analysis: live and historical data, extensible, distribted.
• Many agents talking to a master daemon; many clients then talk to the daemon.
• One common protocol for real-time and historical data.
• Real time conditional learning via a little language.
• Log analysis - some nice tools that will e.g. let you compare points in time.
• GUIs. Everyone loves GUIs.
• Alerting functionality.

PCP compared to SNMP

• SNMP is extensible. To a fault. PCP is extensible, but in a more limited fashion.
• Naming is likewise marginally more limited than SNMP.
• SNMP MIBs have the metadata; in PCP the metadata is in the agent. There’s little more effort up-front when building agents.

Why Build a Bridge?

• They use PCP extensively.
• But you can’t use it with non-general purpose devices.
• PCP does a great job for monitoring, alerting, trending.
• but not for e.g. switches, SANs, server LOMs, and so on.
• The rest of the world uses SNMP.
• There’s no general purpose SNMP gateway.

How it Went

• Side-by-side logging and use of the PCP tools.
• Dynamic, ad-hoc interface that doesn’t need rewriting and reconfiguring ahead of time - this wasn’t possible, unfortunately.
• There’s a solid TODO, mostly in fixing the PCP perl libraries.
• Add dynamic mappings.
• Use the MIBs for number/name mappings.
• Not in production yet.