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perf.plugin

perf.plugin collects system-wide CPU performance statistics from Performance Monitoring Units (PMU) using the perf_event_open() system call.

Important Notes

Accessing hardware PMUs requires root permissions, so the plugin is setuid to root.

Keep in mind that the number of PMUs in a system is usually quite limited and every hardware monitoring event for every CPU core needs a separate file descriptor to be opened.

Charts

The plugin provides statistics for general hardware and software performance monitoring events:

Hardware events:

CPU cycles
Instructions
Branch instructions
Cache operations
BUS cycles
Stalled frontend and backend cycles

Software events:

CPU migrations
Alignment faults
Emulation faults

Hardware cache events:

L1D cache operations
L1D prefetch cache operations
L1I cache operations
LL cache operations
DTLB cache operations
ITLB cache operations
PBU cache operations

Configuration

The plugin is disabled by default because the number of PMUs is usually quite limited and it is not desired to allow Netdata to struggle silently for PMUs, interfering with other performance monitoring software. If you need to enable the perf plugin, edit /etc/netdata/netdata.conf and set:

[plugins]
    perf = yes

[plugin:perf]
    update every = 1
    command options = all

You can use the command options parameter to pick what data should be collected and which charts should be displayed. If all is used, all general performance monitoring counters are probed and corresponding charts are enabled for the available counters. You can also define a particular set of enabled charts using the following keywords: cycles, instructions, branch, cache, bus, stalled, migrations, alighnment, emulation, L1D, L1D-prefetch, L1I, LL, DTLB, ITLB, PBU.

Debugging

You can run the plugin by hand:

sudo /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/perf.plugin 1 all debug

You will get verbose output on what the plugin does.

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