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.