Bug 2209946

Summary: pmlogger_daily not discarding older files at expected times
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Reporter: Pradeep Jagtap <prjagtap>
Component: pcpAssignee: Nathan Scott <nathans>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: Jan Kurik <jkurik>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: 7.9CC: jkurik, nathans, scox
Target Milestone: rcKeywords: Bugfix, Triaged
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: No Doc Update
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2023-06-15 23:58:58 UTC Type: Bug
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Pradeep Jagtap 2023-05-25 10:00:43 UTC
Description of problem:

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
pcp-4.3.2-13.el7_9.x86_64

How reproducible:

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install pcp packages 
2. No major configuration changes apart from below parameter
3. Make sure the PMLOGGER_DAILY_PARAMS
        # grep -v "#" /etc/sysconfig/pmlogger_timers 
        PMLOGGER_DAILY_PARAMS=" --discard 2"

Actual results:
Files older than 2 days not getting discarded 

Expected results:
Files older than 2 days should be discarded

Comment 4 Nathan Scott 2023-05-29 03:06:46 UTC
Hmm, strange - we've not seen this before AFAIK.  Did that pmlogger_daily.log error message occur before your configuration change also or only afterwards?

Can you try removing the configuration change and directly edit the shell script /usr/libexec/pcp/bin/pmlogger_daily CULLAFTER=14 line (set it to CULLAFTER=2 instead) and see if this resolves the problem?  This will tell us if its a configuration issue or a code issue.  Thanks.

[ Resetting prio/sev to 'low' because, either way, there's a workaround available via provisioning a little more disk space.  The fact that no one else reported this over the years suggests something unusual is going no here too.  ]

Comment 5 Pradeep Jagtap 2023-05-29 08:02:37 UTC
[Q] Did that pmlogger_daily.log error message occur before your configuration change also or only afterwards?
[A] These error messages occur after the configuration changes were done.

I made those recommended changes, will monitor for 2 days and share the results.

Comment 6 Nathan Scott 2023-05-29 23:06:57 UTC
Thanks Pradeep.  Very interesting that those errors crept in with the config change - makes me wonder if its something to do with the way the arguments are being passed to pmlogger_daily.  One other thing to try (after the current experiment) would be to remove the whitespace in the string - and perhaps even the quotes too - so, something like:
PMLOGGER_DAILY_PARAMS=-k2

Oh, actually, just noticed something thats changed - in recent versions of PCP we have:
src/pmlogger/pmlogger_daily.service.in:Environment="PMLOGGER_DAILY_PARAMS=-E"
src/pmlogger/pmlogger_daily.service.in:ExecStart=@PCP_BINADM_DIR@/pmlogger_daily $PMLOGGER_DAILY_PARAM

but I see in el7 PCP there's no use of the Environment keyword.  This may have been a systemd change in recent years, not sure, but it may also be worthwhile trying to set the value in the service file rather than the sysconfig file, perhaps.