OSVIS(1) General Commands Manual OSVIS(1)

osvis - visualize high-level system activity

osvis [-V] [-b bytes] [-d activity] [-i ops] [-m packets] [pmview options] [interface ...]

osvis displays an high-level overview of performance statistics collected from the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP(1)) infrastructure. The display is modulated by the values of the performance metrics retrieved from the target host (which is running pmcd(1)) or from the PCP archive log identified by archive. The display is updated every interval seconds (default 2 seconds).

As in all pmview(1) scenes, when the mouse is moved over one of the bars, the current value and metric information for that bar will be shown in the text box near the top of the display. The height and/or color of the bars is proportional to the performance metric values relative to the maximum expected activity, as controlled by the -d, -i and -m options (see below).

The bars in the osvis scene represent the following information:

This column shows CPU utilization, aggregated over all CPUs.
The first stack is the rate of disk read and write operations aggregated over all disk spindles. The second bar is the average time the disks are busy, which approximates average time utilization of all disks.
Disk Controllers
The average time the disks were busy on each controller, which approximates the average time utilization of all disks on each controller.
The three bars represent the average load for the past 1, 5 and 15 minutes. This is normalized by twice the number of CPUs on the machine.
The stack shows memory utilization by breaking down real memory into kernel, file system and user usage. The memory utilization metrics (mem.util) may not be available on all hosts, so Mem may only show the amount of free memory as a single bar on some hosts.
The two rows of bars show the input byte rate and the input packet rate for each network interface, except loopback and slip interfaces.
The two rows of bars show the output byte rate and the output packet rate for each network interface, except for loopback and slip interfaces.

If any optional interface arguments are specified in the command line, then just the network interfaces matching the interface arguments will appear in the Network Input and Network Output sections. By default, all interfaces will be used. The interface arguments are used as patterns for egrep(1) matching against the interface names, so ec would select all external Ethernet interfaces for a Challenge S.

osvis uses pmview(1), and so the user interface follows that described for pmview(1), which in turn displays the scene within an Inventor examiner viewer.

osvis passes most command line options to pmview(1). Therefore, the command line options -A, -a, -C, -h, -n, -O, -p, -S, -t, -T, -x, -Z and -z, and the user interface are described in the pmview(1) man page.

Options specific to osvis are:

Controls the maximum expected network throughput, in bytes. The default value is 65536 bytes.
Controls the maximum expected disk utilization, as a percentage. The default value is 30%.
Controls the maximum (normalization) value for the disk read and write rates. The default value is 100 operations/second.
Controls the maximum (normalization) value for the packet input and packet output rates. The default value is 750 packets/second.
The derived configuration file for pmview(1) is written on standard output. This may be saved and used directly with pmview if the user wishes to customize the display, or modify some of the normalization parameters.

$PCP_VAR_DIR/pmns/*
default PMNS specification files
$PCP_VAR_DIR/config/pmlogger/config.osvis
pmlogger(1) configuration file that can be used to create a PCP archive suitable for display with osvis

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(4).

pmcd(1), pmlogger(1), pmview(1), pcp.conf(4), pcp.env(4) and pmlaunch(5).

osvis will silently remove those blocks from the scene whose metrics are not available from the live host or the archive.

Performance Co-Pilot