HP Caliper Advisor Rule Writer Guide

Glossary
accessor
function
A function called by an analysis rule to retrieve performance data for the analysis object.
advice class A grouping for advice from the Advisor. Every piece of advice belongs to one of these classes:
general, CPU, memory, IO, and system.
advice
function
The function called by an analysis rule to generate advice about the user's application performance.
analysis
object
Any type of entity whose performance whose performance one is interested in, such as executable
programs, threads, functions, shared libraries, and the kernel. For this release of the Advisor, an
executable program is the only type of analysis object supported.
analysis rule A rule used by the HP Caliper Advisor to access any data that might have been collected on a
particular performance problem, assess whether the problem might exist in an application, and
print appropriate advice to the user.
base version A type of accessor function that always returns metric values from the first (and possibly only)
dataset that matches. The other type of accessor function is nth version.
chaining The technique of retrieving performance data from some dataset and retrieving additional metrics
from the same dataset.
databases
directory
The directory where output databases are created for each data collection run of HP Caliper,
unless you use the -d option. By default, the databases directory is created in a directory called
.hp_caliper_databases in your current directory. You can override this by setting the
CALIPER_DATABASES environment variable to point to another location.
dataset A unique set of data, stored in an HP Caliper database, that is associated with a single measurement
run. Each dataset contains several types of performance data. A dataset could consist of PMU
metric statistics, histogram data, call graphs, general run performance data, and so forth.
global metrics
accessor
function
An accessor function used to retrieve global metrics.
helper
function
A function that is called only by a rule function or another helper function. A helper function can
have any name and any number of parameters.
histogram A flat profile.
histogram
accessor
function
An accessor function used to retrieve histograms.
histogram
type
The type of histogram whose data can be retrieved using a histogram accessor function. The type
can be ALAT misses, data cache misses, data translation lookaside buffer misses, instruction cache
misses, instruction pointer, or instruction translation lookaside buffer misses.
HP Caliper
Advisor
A rules-based expert system designed to give guidance about improving the performance of an
application.
index value A value that represents the approximate importance of a particular piece of advice from the
Advisor.
metric list A set of metrics to be retrieved by an accessor function.
nth version A type of accessor function that allows a rule to search for multiple datasets that might provide
the requested metric(s). The nth version is a superset of the base version and takes the same
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