I've been trying to tell people to use perf for years now. I think there was a lot of disservice done by early versions that were buggy, crash and freeze prone. Still better then I oprofile before it.

It only got better once they added trace points to perf events. Now I can simply trace all futex syscall enters to look for lock/synchronization contention.

One extra tool I recommend is dynamic logging which you can enable from kernel build. Create any log mask (file/like me/module) set a level and you're off to the races. Invaluable in certain scenarios (like debugging bugs in fail path of fscache module).