Parallel programming languages/libraries including OpenMP, MPI, and UPC are either in the process of defining or have already established standard performance profiling interfaces. The OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) recently sanctioned an interface specification for profiling/tracing tools that defines a protocol for two-way communications and control between the OpenMP runtime library and performance tools. To evaluate this approach to performance measurement, the PerfOMP interface has been designed to operate as an intermediary software layer to support unidirectional communications from the OpenMP runtime library to performance tools. PerfOMP can support the implementation of the OpenMP ARB sanctioned profiling interface by providing the underlying infrastructure for tracking OpenMP events/states inside the OpenMP runtime and satisfying specific queries made by the performance tool to the OpenMP runtime. Alternatively, PerfOMP can be implemented to directly profile or trace the performance of an OpenMP application through the OpenMP runtime library. PerfOMP has been integrated into an existing open source compilation and performance tool environment and successfully tested with benchmark kernels and a production quality parallel computational fluid dynamics application. Design, implementation details and case study results are presented that highlight the benefits and potential insights that this approach can offer to compiler and tool developers, performance analysts, and end-user application scientists.