Event tracing is a powerful method of analyzing the performance behavior of parallel applications. Because event traces record the temporal and spatial relationships between individual runtime events, they allow application developers to analyze dependences of performance phenomena across concurrent control flows. However, in view of the large amounts of data generated on contemporary parallel machines, the depth and coverage of a purely manual analysis is often limited. In this article, we present an approach of automatically searching event traces for execution patterns indicating inefficient behavior, allowing developers to study the performance of their applications on a very high level of abstraction, while consuming significantly less expert time than a manual analysis.