This paper presents PERISCOPE - an online distributed performance analysis tool that searches for a wide range of performance bottlenecks in parallel applications. It consists of a set of agents that capture and analyze application and hardware-related properties in an autonomous fashion. The paper focuses on the Periscope design, the different search methodologies, and the steps involved to do an online performance analysis. A new graphical user-friendly interface based on Eclipse is introduced. Through the use of this new easy-to-use graphical interface, remote execution, selection of the type of analysis, and the inspection of the found properties can be performed in an intuitive and easy way. In addition, a real-world application, namely, the GENE code, a grand challenge problem of plasma physics is analyzed using Periscope. The results are illustrated in terms of found properties and scalability issues.