Understanding and validating the timing behavior of real-time systems is not trivial.
Many real-time operating systems and their development environments do not provide tracing support, and provide only limited visualization, measurements and analysis tools.
Grasp<http://www.win.tue.nl/san/grasp/>_ is a tool for tracing, visualizing and measuring the behavior of real-time systems. It provides a simple plugin infrastructure for extending Grasp with custom visualization and measurement methods.