Equivalent for Win32 performance counters on Linux

Question

What are the Linux equivalent of Windows's performance counters?

• API/libraries to publish application counters
• API/libraries to monitor and collect values efficiently (like pdh.dll)
• applications to monitor the current values (equivalent of perfmon.exe)
• applications to schedule collecting (like logman.exec)
• applications to visualize collected values (again, perfmon.exe)

Or, to put it more broadly, what is the recommended system performance monitoring infrastructure on Linux?

Answer 1

There's one infrastructure with supporting tools that have been in the mainline kernel for along time, OProfile. However, the interface was in some respects broken, and it didn't really see much use outside the somewhat primitive oprofile command line tools. Then there were a bunch of "oprofile replacements", perfmon, perfmon2, perfctr, perfmon3(?), etc., until finally a few months ago the Perf events infrastructure was merged.

Then there are a number of higher level libraries and tools built on top of the above kernel level interfaces, such as PAPI and TAU