Modern systems with their millions of lines of code are beyond deep
comprehension of any developer. Often developers use program tracing
and profiling to extract information, which helps them to understand
the system's behaviour. Often monitors are then also deployed in the
final system to check the proper functioning of the system at run
time.

Code instrumentation is a common method for extracting information
from running programs.  Current instrumentation methods are
inapplicable for real-time applications, because these methods'
current theory and practice concentrate on preserving logical
correctness only. Real-time applications, however, must also meet
timing requirements and thus instrumentation and, more generally,
information extraction mechanisms must also preserve such properties.

This talk first introduces the general problem of using software-based
mechanisms for information extraction, and then discusses two
approaches applicable to real-time systems: time-aware instrumentation
and time-triggered runtime verification.