A system and method is provided for measuring lock usage in a non-intrusive manner. Measurements are performed only when a lock is contended. When a lock is requested and the lock is available (i.e., is not contended), the only data gathered is a counter that is incremented to keep track of the number of times the particular lock was requested. When a lock is contended, an operating system trace hook is requested. The trace hook records data such as the timestamp that the requestor requested the lock, the request count, a stack traceback to identify the function corresponding to the requestor, and the address of the lock that was requested. Post-operative processing analyzes the recorded trace hook data to identify contended locks and processes that may not be efficiently using locks.