Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) is a framework and set of services for supporting system-level performance monitoring and performance management. It provides a unifying abstraction for all of the interesting performance data in a system, and allows client applications to easily retrieve and process any subset of that data using a single API. A client-server architecture allows multiple clients to monitor the same host, and a single client to monitor multiple hosts. Archive logging and replay are integrated so that a client application can use the same API to process real-time data from a host or historical data from an archive.