Intel® VTune™ Amplifier
Intel® VTune™ Amplifier Platform Profiler provides the ability to collect data over a longer time period (minutes or hours vs seconds) showing a holistic view into system behavior, including CPU, memory, network, and disk usage.
This is a PREVIEW FEATURE. A preview feature may or may not appear in a future production release. It is available for your use in the hopes that you will provide feedback on its usefulness and help determine its future. Data collected with a preview feature is not guaranteed to be backward compatible with future releases. Please send your feedback to parallel.studio.support@intel.com or to intelsystemstudio@intel.com.
Use the Platform Profiler to gain insights into overall system configuration, performance, and behavior. The tool provides special focus on identifying platform-level memory, storage, I/O, and interconnect bottlenecks and imbalances and can collect data on a deployed system running a full load over an extended period of time. To accomplish this, the Platform Profiler reads performance data collected using a data collector component on a target system, analyzes the data, and makes it available via web APIs and an easy-to-use HTML user interface.
There are three key components to the tool: data collector, server, and web-based user interface. Some minor configuration is required before using the tool. For details, see Platform Profiler Setup (Preview).
Identify a typical workload for the system under analysis (system on which the collectors are installed). Systems in a data center or those running a continuous workload could use a sample time period.
Set up the environment.
On Linux:
source /opt/intel/<studio>/vtune_amplifier_<version>/vpp/collector/vpp-collect-vars.sh
On Windows:
C:\<Program Files (x86)>\IntelSWTools\<studio>\VTune Amplifier <version>\vpp\collector\vpp-collect-vars.cmd
Run the following command to start data collection:
vpp-collect-start
Use the -c option when starting collection to add a comment to your result file. The comment will be visible after uploading the result to the server and can help differentiate between results collected on the same system. For instance, you might add a description of your workload.
[Optional] While data collection is running, use the following command to add timeline markers to your result at intervals of your choosing:
vpp-collect-mark "comment"
Use the comment to add an optional label to your timeline marker.
Run the following command to stop data collection:
vpp-collect-stop
Collection results are available in a compressed file in the current directory (<machine-name>_<datetime>.tgz/zip).
The VTune Amplifier Platform Profiler results can be uploaded the server for viewing. For more information, see Platform Profiler Results (Preview).
Consider whether an upgrade to hardware components (CPU, memory, storage, network) would improve performance. After new hardware is installed, re-run Platform Profiler and compare performance between the older and newer components.
Analyze the collected data to determine where the performance bottleneck is most prevalent and which components are impacted. If a specific portion of the workload is causing performance issues, consider running the following analysis types using Intel® VTune™ Amplifier and a targeted collection interval (seconds instead of hours):
Microarchitecture Exploration: Identify issues with CPU utilization, cache, or memory
Memory Access: Identify memory issues
Input and Output: Identify storage usage issues