Help using Vtune for hardware performance counter monitoring

Hi All,

I am new to Vtune, I have few basic questions to get me started using it, please help me out.

I am working on a XEON E5345 processor and I want to few monitor hardware performance events (like L1 misses, L2 hits/misses, LLC hits/misses etc) using Vtune's command line interface. I was reading through some guides and the user forum and I think I can use vtune like :-

amplxe-cl -collect-with runsa -knob event-config=CPU_CLK_UNHALTED.CORE:sa=1000000 -- C:\test\sample.exe

My questions are:-

a) I want to know what are all the different kind of events available on my system for monitoring. Is there any limitation as to what all and how many events can be monitored together?

b) Also, I found something about a "collect general exploration" analysis option with vtune, how is it different from running vtune with the "collect-with" and "runsa" option.

Thanks for your help.

- Rene