The Performance Co-Pilot is a toolkit designed for monitoring and managing system-level performance. These services are distributed and scalable to accommodate very complex system configurations and performance problems.

PCP supports many different platforms, including (but not limited to) Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows. From a high-level PCP can be considered to contain two classes of software utility:

These are the parts of PCP that collect and extract performance data from various sources, e.g. the operating system kernel.

These are the parts of PCP that display data collected from hosts (or archives) that have the PCP Collector installed. Many monitor tools are available as part of the core PCP release, while other (typically graphical) monitoring tools are available separately in the PCP GUI or PCP WebApp packages.

The PCP architecture is distributed in the sense that any PCP tool may be executing remotely. On the host (or hosts) being monitored, each domain of performance metrics, whether the kernel, a service layer, a database management system, a web server, an application, etc. requires a Performance Metrics Domain Agent (PMDA) which is responsible for collecting performance measurements from that domain. All PMDAs are controlled by the Performance Metrics Collector Daemon (PMCD) on the same host.

Client applications (the monitoring tools) connect to PMCD, which acts as a router for requests, by forwarding requests to the appropriate PMDA and returning the responses to the clients. Clients may also access performance data from a PCP archive for retrospective analysis.