HP Caliper User's Guide

Figure 1-1 HP Caliper Components (User Interfaces)
HP Caliper CLI
Performance
reports
HP Caliper
database(s)
Integrity Server (HP-UX or Linux)
X86 desktop
(Windows or Linux)
Application
HP Caliper
HP Caliper GUI
(local)
HP Caliper GUI
(remote)
X11
server
HP Caliper selectively measures the processes, threads, and load modules of your
application. HP Caliper performs data collection in one of two modes:
• System-wide: In a system-wide measurement, HP Caliper measures activity across
the entire system, and attributes measurements to the kernel and individual
processes where possible.
• Per-process: In a per-process measurement, HP Caliper tracks individual processes
and their children and measures each separately.
HP Caliper uses the performance monitoring unit (PMU) of the Itanium processor
family to gather the requested performance data. This is done primarily through
non-intrusive sampling, both time-based and event-based, as well as exact counts of
particular metrics. HP Caliper provides data on hundreds of events monitored by the
PMU.
On HP-UX, it also uses dynamic instrumentation of code for some measurements. It
only instruments the portions of the application that actually get executed, thus
eliminating unnecessary instrumentation overhead.
Reports show measured data by thread, load module, function, statement, and
instruction.
HP Caliper uses a single command (called caliper) for all measurements. You specify
the type of measurement and the target program as command-line arguments.
For example:
$ caliper myprog
24 HP Caliper at a Glance