Vector is an open source on-host performance monitoring framework which exposes hand picked high resolution system and application metrics to every engineer’s browser. Having the right metrics available on-demand and at a high resolution is key to understand how a system behaves and correctly troubleshoot performance issues.

Disclaimer

This is the first release of Vector. As such, expect to find bugs and issues. We count on your support to find and report them!

Vector is under constant development and new versions should be released often.

Getting Started

In order to get started, you should first install Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) on each host you plan to monitor. PCP will collect the metrics and make them available for Vector. The pmcd and pmwebd services need to be running on each host, the latter of which needs to expose its tcp/44323 network port.

Optional monitoring agents can also be installed in order to collect specific metrics that are not supported by PCP's system agent.

Once PCP is installed, you should be able to run Vector and connect to the target host.

Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)

Vector depends on Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) to collect metrics on each host you plan to monitor.

Since Vector depends on version 3.10 or higher, the packages currently available on most Linux distro repositories would not suffice. Until newer versions are available in the repositories, you should be able to install PCP from binary packages made available by the PCP development team on:

ftp.pcp.io

Or build it from source. To do so, get the current version of the source code:

$ git clone git://git.pcp.io/pcp

Check that prerequisites such as libmicrohttpd headers/libraries and pkgconfig are installed. Then build and install:

$ cd pcp
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
$ make
# make install

More information on how to install Performance Co-Pilot can be found at:

http://pcp.io/docs/installation.html#src

Vector

Vector is a static web application that runs inside the client's browser. It can run locally or deployed to any HTTP server available, like Apache or Nginx.

To run in locally, first clone the repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/Netflix/vector.git

Make sure you have Bower installed on your system. Bower is a package management system for client-side programming, optimized for the front-end development.

http://bower.io/#getting-started

And install all dependencies:

$ cd vector
$ bower install

You can run Vector with Gulp. Gulp is an automated task runner and includes a development web server with live reload. In order to start Gulp’s web server, first make sure you have Gulp installed on your system:

https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp/blob/master/docs/getting-started.md

Then, install the dependencies and execute the default Gulp task:

$ npm install
$ gulp

You can also run Vector with Python's SimpleHTTPServer:

$ cd vector/app
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

Then open Vector on your browser:

http://localhost:8080

And enter the hostname from the server you plan on monitoring. That's it!

Issues

For bugs, questions and discussions please use the Github Issues.

License

Copyright 2015 Netflix, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.