Performance Co-Pilot Grafana Plugin

Overview

Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) provides a framework and services to support system-level performance monitoring and management. It presents a unifying abstraction for all of the performance data in a system, and many tools for interrogating, retrieving and processing that data.

This Grafana app plugin integrates PCP metrics into Grafana, bundling three datasources and premade dashboards for real-time monitoring, historical analysis, and eBPF tracing.

More screenshots

Requirements

• Grafana >= 12.4.3
• Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) with pmcd and pmproxy running on the monitored host(s)
  • PCP Vector and PCP bpftrace connect to pmproxy for real-time metrics
• Valkey (or Redis) with pmlogger archiving metrics and pmproxy configured to write to the key server for the PCP Valkey datasource
• bpftrace installed on the monitored host for the PCP bpftrace datasource

Getting Started

1. Install the plugin from the Grafana plugin catalog or with the Grafana CLI:

   grafana cli plugins install performancecopilot-pcp-app

2. Enable the app plugin in Grafana under Administration > Plugins > Performance Co-Pilot and click Enable.

3. Configure a datasource under Connections > Data sources > Add data source:

   • PCP Vector — for real-time metrics from a single host. Set the URL to your pmproxy instance (default: http://localhost:44322).
   • PCP Valkey — for historical metrics stored in Valkey/Redis. Set the URL to your pmproxy instance.
   • PCP bpftrace — for eBPF tracing scripts. Set the URL to your pmproxy instance.

4. Import bundled dashboards from each datasource's settings page under the Dashboards tab. The PCP Vector Checklist dashboards use the USE method to detect potential performance issues.

Features

• Analysis of historical PCP metrics using pmseries query language
• Analysis of real-time PCP metrics using pmwebapi live services
• Enhanced Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) tracing using bpftrace scripts
• Dashboards for detecting potential performance issues using the Utilization Saturation and Errors (USE) method [2]
• Full-text search in metric names, descriptions, instances [1]
• Support for Grafana Alerting [1]
• Support for derived metrics (arithmetic operators and statistical functions inside a query) [2]
• Automated configuration of metric units [1,2,3]
• Automatic rate and time utilization conversion
• Heatmap, table [2,3] and flame graph [3] support
• Auto completion of metric names [1,2], qualifier keys and values [1], and bpftrace probes, builtin variables and functions [3]
• Display of semantics, units and help texts of metrics [2] and bpftrace builtins [3]
• Legend templating support with $metric, $metric0, $instance, $some_label, $some_dashboard_variable
• Container support [1,2]
• Support for custom endpoint and hostspec per panel [2,3]
• Support for repeated panels
• Sample dashboards for all datasources

[1] PCP Valkey [2] PCP Vector [3] PCP bpftrace

Documentation

Contributing