Hardware counter events on some popular architectures were investigated with the purpose of detecting bottle-necks of particular interest to shared memory programming, such as OpenMP. A fully portable test suite was written in OpenMP, accessing the hardware performance counters be means of PAPI. Relevant events for the intended purpose were shown to exist on the investigated platforms. Further, these events could in most cases be accessed directly through their platform independent, PAPI pre-defined, names. In some cases suggestions for improvement in the pre-defined mapping were made based on the experiments.