SGI's Open Source Performance Co-Pilot 24
codesmythe writes "The Fates, through SGI nee Rackable, have granted a new beginning to Silicon Valley's once darling Silicon Graphics. Despite old mistakes and economic misfortunes, Silicon Graphics' engineering contributions are legendary: their systems (oh, the systems!), and software such as the well known OpenGL and the little known Performance Co-Pilot. PCP is an enterprise-class open source system monitoring, measurement, and visualization infrastructure — overlooked in last fall's monitoring tool discussion. Since its proprietary beginning in 1993, PCP has been re-released as open source and ported to all major operating systems. Readers of Slashdot's recent Beginning Python Visualization book review will be pleased to hear there are Python interfaces to PCP data sources. Here is an example of using Python and Blender to visualize PCP data (registration may be required). The PCP dev community is well and active, and includes several of the original team members."
nee rackable? (Score:2, Informative)
I've used it... (Score:3, Informative)
I've written systems that use Performance Co-Pilot. It is actually really sweet, and gives you so much in terms of general accounting. We tracked CPU load, network load, user/kernel time, as well as adding our own tags to track. The PCP infrastructure had automatic archive and visualization of all data, including realtime visualization, as data was being logged. You can also plot relationships (in real time).
This stuff is certainly the non-sexy part of enterprise software development, but it is pretty cool once it is integrated (actually quite easy), and gives you so much. Not to mention, saves *huge* amounts of time because it was so complete.