How to: Specify additional instrumentation options

Applies to: Visual Studio Visual Studio for Mac

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

You can instrument binaries from using the Visual Studio IDE or by using command line tools. If you instrument a binary from within the IDE, you can control the volume of data that is collected during instrumentation by specifying additional instrumentation options to the VSInstr tool. These options are available at the session or the target level. For example, to include or exclude specific functions during the instrumentation process, use the additional instrumentation option at the target level.

Important

Every probe that is inserted modifies the behavior of the original program slightly. This modification causes overhead at analysis time. Even though an approximation of this overhead is subtracted, it still has subtle timing effects on multithreaded applications. The VSInstr tool options help control data collection during profiling.

To specify additional instrumentation option

1. In Performance Explorer, select the Performance Session and then right-click and select Properties.

2. In the Properties Pages, click the Advanced properties.

3. Type options in the Additional instrumentation options box.

   For example, use /CONTROL:THREAD to specify the profiling level. For a complete list of options, see VSInstr.

4. Click OK.

See also

Configure performance sessions Profile from the command-line