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PMFETCH(3) Library Functions Manual PMFETCH(3)
pmFetch - get performance metric values
#include <pcp/pmapi.h> int pmFetch(int numpmid, pmID *pmidlist, pmResult **result); cc ... -lpcp
Given a list of Performance Metric Identifiers (PMID)s, e.g. as constructed by pmLookupName(3), via pmidlist and numpmid, fetch the values for these performance metrics. A call to pmFetch is executed in the context of a source of met‐ rics, instance profile and collection time, previously established by calls to the appropriate context and profile functions, namely some of pmNewContext(3), pmDupContext(3), pmUseContext(3), pmAddProfile(3), pmDelProfile(3) and pmSetMode(3). The principal result from pmFetch is returned in the argument re‐ sult as a tree, using the following component data structures; typedef struct { unsigned int vtype : 8; /* value type (same as pmDesc.type) */ unsigned int vlen : 24; /* bytes for vtype/vlen + vbuf */ char vbuf[1]; /* one or more values */ } pmValueBlock; typedef struct { int inst; /* instance identifier */ union { pmValueBlock *pval; /* pointer to value-block */ int lval; /* integer value insitu */ } value; } pmValue; typedef struct { pmID pmid; /* metric identifier */ int numval; /* number of values or error code */ int valfmt; /* value style, insitu or ptr */ pmValue vlist[1]; /* set of instances/values */ } pmValueSet; /* Result returned by pmFetch() */ typedef struct { struct timespec timestamp; /* time stamped by collector */ int numpmid; /* number of PMIDs */ pmValueSet *vset[1]; /* set of value sets */ } pmResult; To accommodate metrics with multiple value instances, the numval field indicates how many values are returned for each requested PMID. The field valfmt in the pmValueSet structure indicates if the values for this metric are stored insitu in the lval field, i.e. a 32-bit integer quantity (either int, unsigned int, long or unsigned long) or if the values are held in associated pmValue‐ Block structures. The pmValueBlock structure is always used for floating point values (float or double) and also accommodates ar‐ bitrary sized binary data such as `string-valued' metrics and met‐ rics with aggregated or complex data types. The maximum length of a pmValueBlock buffer is PM_VAL_VLEN_MAX bytes. If the pmValue‐ Block format is used, the vtype field indicates the data type of the value. This field has the same interpretation as the type field in the pmDesc structure, see pmLookupDesc(3). Note that the insitu value may be a signed or unsigned 32 bit in‐ teger, signed or unsigned 32 bit long value (on 32 bit platforms), In the special cases described below, it may also be a 32 bit floating point value. If the application needs to know the type of an insitu value, which is almost always the case, it is neces‐ sary to fetch the descriptor for the metric and interpret the type field, as described in detail in pmLookupDesc(3). When the pmRe‐ sult is received from a PCP1.x pmcd, insitu values may also be 32 bit floating point values (of type PM_TYPE_FLOAT). In all cases, it is good practice to use pmLookupDesc(3) to fetch the descriptor for the metric and interpret the type field therein. Note also that the PMAPI(3) will automatically translate from the PCP2.0 format to the PCP1.x format when a PCP1.x client requests 32 bit floating point values from a PCP2.0 pmcd, but the reverse transla‐ tion does not occur (because the PCP2.0 pmcd cannot automatically distinguish between arbitrary 32 bit floating point values and 32 bit integers). If one value (i.e. associated with a particular instance) for a requested metric is `unavailable' (at the requested time), then there is no associated pmValue structure in the result. If there are no available values for a metric, then numval will be zero and the associated pmValue[] instance will be empty (valfmt is unde‐ fined in these circumstances, however pmid will be correctly set to the PMID of the metric with no values). As an extension of this protocol, if the Performance Metrics Col‐ lection System (PMCS) is able to provide a reason why no values are available for a particular metric, this is encoded as a stan‐ dard error code in the corresponding numval. Since the error codes are all negative, values for a requested metric are `un‐ available' if numval is less than, or equal to, zero. A perfor‐ mance metric's value may be `unavailable' for a number of reasons; the following list is illustrative but not exhaustive: of the software for the associated Performance Metric Domain + Collection is not currently activated in the software for the associated Performance Metric Domain + The associated PMID is not known + The current system configuration does not include the asso‐ ciated hardware component and/or the associated software module, e.g. a disk is not installed, or off-line, or Ora‐ cle is not installed + The metric is one for which an instance profile is re‐ quired, and none was provided (there are a small number of metrics in this category, typically ones with very large, and/or very dynamic instance domains, and/or expensive met‐ ric instantiation methods). + If the current context involves fetching metrics from an archive, values may be unavailable in the region around a <mark> record (see pmlogextract(1)) that indicate a tempo‐ ral discontinuity in the time-series of metric values. In general, we may not be able to differentiate between the vari‐ ous cases, and if differentiation is not possible, numval will simply be zero. The argument definition and the result specifications have been constructed to ensure that for each PMID in the requested pmidlist there is exactly one pmValueSet in the result, and further the PMIDs appear in exactly the same sequence in both pmidlist and re‐ sult. This makes the number and order of entries in result com‐ pletely deterministic, and greatly simplifies the application pro‐ gramming logic after the call to pmFetch. The result structure returned by pmFetch is dynamically allocated using a combination of malloc(3) calls and specialized allocation strategies, and should be released when no longer required by calling pmFreeResult(3) - under no circumstances should free(3) be called directly to release this space. As common error conditions are encoded in the result data struc‐ ture, we'd expect only cataclysmic events to cause an error value to be returned. One example would be if the metrics source con‐ text was a remote host, and that host or the PMCS on that host be‐ came unreachable. Otherwise the value returned by the pmFetch function will be non-negative. If the current context involves fetching metrics from a Perfor‐ mance Metrics Collector Daemon (PMCD), then the return value may be used to encode out-of-band changes in the state of the PMCD and the associated Performance Metrics Daemon Agents (PMDAs), as a bit-wise ``or'' of the following values: PMCD_RESTART_AGENT An attempt has been made to restart at least one failed PMDA. PMCD_ADD_AGENT At least one PMDA has been started. PMCD_DROP_AGENT PMCD has noticed the termination of at least one PMDA. PMCD_AGENT_CHANGE A convenience macro for any of the three PMDA changes. PMCD_LABEL_CHANGE PMCD has been informed of changes to global (context) labels, or new metrics have appeared which have associated labels. PMCD_NAMES_CHANGE PMCD has been informed that the namespace has been modified, such that new metrics have ap‐ peared or existing metrics have been removed. PMCD_HOSTNAME_CHANGE The hostname on the host where PMCD is running has changed. This may be the result of changes from temporary to permanent hostname after a system reboot or some subsequent ex‐ plicit change to the system's hostname. The default is to return zero to indicate no change in state, how‐ ever the pmResult returned by pmFetch has the same interpretation independent of the return value being zero or greater than zero.
Prior to PCP 7.0 the timestamp field in the pmResult struct was a struct timeval. To support PMAPI transition, the old interface and semantics can be used if applications are recompiled with -DPMAPI_VERSION=2. For a time in PCP 6.x there was a routine with the same semantics as the current pmFetch called pmFetchHighRes, and a struct with the same definition as the current pmResult struct called pmRe‐ sultHighRes, although both are now deprecated and compile-time support for pmFetchHighRes (and the historically misnamed alias pmHighResFetch) and pmResultHighRes will be removed in a future release.
pmcd(1), pmAddProfile(3), PMAPI(3), pmDelProfile(3), pmDupContext(3), pmExtractValue(3), pmFetchArchive(3), pmFreeResult(3), pmGetInDom(3), pmLookupDesc(3), pmLookupLabels(3), pmLookupName(3), pmNewContext(3), pmSetMode(3), pmUseContext(3) and pmWhichContext(3). Note that pmFetch is the most primitive method for fetching metric values from the PMCS. See the pmFetchGroup(3) API for a higher level method that insulates the user from the intricacies of look‐ ing up metric names and metadata, setting up instance profiles, pmResult traversal, conversions, and scaling.
As mentioned above, pmFetch return error codes insitu in the argu‐ ment result. If no result is returned, e.g. due to IPC failure using the current PMAPI context, or end of file on an archive, then these routines will return a negative error code which may be examined using pmErrStr(3). PM_ERR_EOL When fetching records from an archive, pmFetch returns this error code to indicate the end of the archive has been passed (or the start of the archive has been passed, if the direction of traversal is backwards in time). If the ``mode'' for the current PMAPI context (see pmSetMode(3)) is PM_MODE_INTERP then the time origin is advanced, even when this error code is returned. In this way applications that position the time outside the range defined by the records in the archive, and then commence to pmFetch will eventually see valid results once the time origin moves in‐ side the temporal span of the archive. -EAGAIN If the current context involves fetching metrics from pmcd, then a return value of -EAGAIN indicates the caller has created too many contexts.
Many of the performance metrics exported from PCP agents have the semantics of counter meaning they are expected to be monotonically increasing. Under some circumstances, one value of these metrics may be smaller than the previously fetched value. This can happen when a counter of finite precision overflows, or when the PCP agent has been reset or restarted, or when the PCP agent is ex‐ porting values from some underlying instrumentation that is sub‐ ject to some asynchronous discontinuity. The environment variable PCP_COUNTER_WRAP may be set to indicate that all such cases of a decreasing ``counter'' should be treated as a counter overflow, and hence the values are assumed to have wrapped once in the interval between consecutive samples. This ``wrapping'' behavior was the default in earlier PCP versions, but by default has been disabled in PCP version 1.3 and later.
This page is part of the PCP (Performance Co-Pilot) project. In‐ formation about the project can be found at ⟨http://www.pcp.io/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual page, send it to pcp@groups.io. This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository ⟨https://github.com/performancecopilot/pcp.git⟩ on 2025年08月11日. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the repository was 2025年08月11日.) 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 man-pages@man7.org Performance Co-Pilot PCP PMFETCH(3)
Pages that refer to this page: pmdaopenmetrics(1), pmgenmap(1), pmstore(1), pcpintro(3), pmaddprofile(3), pmapi(3), __pmcontrollog(3), pmconvscale(3), pmdafetch(3), pmdelprofile(3), pmextractvalue(3), pmfetcharchive(3), pmfreeresult(3), pmgetarchiveend(3), pmgetcontexthostname(3), pmgetderivedcontrol(3), pmlookuplabels(3), pmnewcontext(3), pmnewcontextzone(3), pmprintvalue(3), pmregisterderived(3), pmsetmode(3), pmsortinstances(3), pmstore(3), pmwebapi(3), QmcIndom(3), LOGARCHIVE(5)
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