libperfmon Tutorial: Instrumentation

Intsrumentation is the process of inserting performance measurement calls at points of interest in the application being analyzed.

Manual instrumentation requires the user to insert these calls. The user has complete control over where the calls are inserted and precisely which measurements will be collected at each point.
Automatic instrumentation is done across the entire application by the compiler. A set of compiler switches define the metrics which can be collected in this way.
An instrumented program must be linked with libperfmon.a.
For example:

cc -cougar -o pfile pfile.c -lperfmon

Intel Tutorial Notes