Probing PDFs and soft QCD at the LHC

LHC has delivered 30 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV in 2010-2012 during the LHC Run I. Run II has started in 2015 and approximately 200 pb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV have been delivered by September. An important part of physics program in ATLAS and CMS experiments are precision studies of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Parton density functions (PDFs) are an essential part of calculation of any process at hadron collider. Detailed studies of soft proton-proton interactions and production of soft particles allows to improve phenomenology of processes in non-perturbative QCD domain. A selection of measurements probing PDFs and soft QCD based on Run I data as well as early results from Run II are presented in this review.