This paper presents the design, implementation, and application of TALP, a lightweight, portable, extensible, and scalable tool for online parallel performance measurement. The efficiency metrics reported by TALP allow HPC users to evaluate the parallel efficiency of their executions, both post-mortem and at runtime. The API that TALP provides allows the running application or resource managers to collect performance metrics at runtime. This enables the opportunity to adapt the execution based on the metrics collected dynamically. The set of metrics collected by TALP are well defined, independent of the tool, and consolidated. We extend the collection of metrics with two additional ones that can differentiate between the load imbalance originated from the intranode or internode imbalance. We evaluate the potential of TALP with three parallel applications that present various parallel issues and carefully analyze the overhead introduced to determine its limitations. CCS CONCEPTS• Computing methodologies → Parallel computing methodologies; Distributed computing methodologies; • General and reference → Performance; • Computer systems organization → Multicore architectures.