Defining a metric as individual units of information, a provider is any subsystem that contains metrics for export, a consumer is any subsystem that needs to import metrics, and a method is the process by which metric information is retrieved. The purpose of Performance Services is to isolate the consumer from method changes within the PNS, microkernel and hardware, so the consumer can continue to use the same architected interface to obtain information.
The level of Performance Services support on the system can be obtained by dciInitialize.
This chapter includes the following sections: