# Introduction

The Qualcomm Profiler tool is a system-wide performance profiling tool designed to visualize system performance and identify optimization and application scaling improvement opportunities across Qualcomm SoC CPUs, GPUs, DSPs and other IP blocks.

This document provides steps to setup Qualcomm Profiler and information on how to use use it to collect system-wide performance profiling metrics.

Qualcomm Profiler provides the following modes.

## Host streaming

Users can profile a connected device from the host and get live profiling metrics. To enable host-based profiling, the host must be able to communicate to the device over IP. It is supported for the following hosts:

- Windows
- Ubuntu 20 and above
- Windows on ARM

Host streaming can be done in the following ways:

- [Qualcomm Profiler GUI Application](https://docs.qualcomm.com/doc/80-54323-2/topic/gui-application.html#id1) - GUI application running on a host PC used to collect various performance metrics from the device. Supported for Windows and Ubuntu.
- [Command Line Interface](https://docs.qualcomm.com/doc/80-54323-2/topic/command-line-interface.html#command-line-interface) - Host-based command line interface (CLI) that can be executed on a host PC to stream various profiling metrics from the target
- On-host API - Lightweight C-based API that provides an interface for developers to profile and optimize their applications on Qualcomm platforms.

## On-device profiling

Users can profile from a device shell on the following targets:

- Android
- QNX
- Qualcomm Linux
- Windows on ARM

On-device profiling can be done in the following ways:

- [Qualcomm Profiler GUI Application](https://docs.qualcomm.com/doc/80-54323-2/topic/gui-application.html#id1) - GUI application running on a host PC used to collect various performance metrics from the device. It is supported for Windows on ARM.
- [Command Line Interface](https://docs.qualcomm.com/doc/80-54323-2/topic/command-line-interface.html#command-line-interface) - Lightweight, on-device CLI that can be executed in a device shell to collect various profiling metrics for the device filesystem. Can later be analyzed using the Qualcomm Profiler GUI.
- API - Lightweight C-based API that provides an interface for developers to profile and optimize their applications on Qualcomm platforms.

Last Published: Aug 25, 2025

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