Re:I've used it... (Score 1)

PCP was developed for addressing hard performance problems in complex, often distributed, systems. The relevant performance data is hiding the in the hardware instrumentation, the operating system, the service layers (dbms, web, mail, ...), the network and the applications.

So there is not a lot of SNMP coverage here to start with.

Secondly, the metadata services of SNMP are rather weak and we wanted something much richer to describe the available performance data that changed from platform to platform and from one software release to the next.

And finally we did lots of experiments to show that the PCP protocols were much more efficient than SNMP in terms of CPU load to encode and decode messages and numbers of roundtrips to support monitoring activities.

So PCP provides a set of services that are similar, but different in some important ways, to SNMP.

There are two possible points of integration of PCP and SNMP:

1. a PCP wrapper could be built around an SNMP client to retrieve performance and configuration data from an SNMP source and export it into the PCP framework (Mark Goodwin wrote such an piece a long time ago)
2. the PCP inference engine (pmie) can be configured to generate alarms that will trigger SNMP traps into an SNMP-based enterprise management framework