The presentation will briefly introduce the organization of the DORSAL laboratory and the collaborative research and development projects undertaken with the financial support of industrial partners, including Ericsson, and the Canadian and Quebec governments. Then, several recent results in the area of kernel and user level tracing and trace analysis will be outlined, with emphasis on real-time, distributed, multi-core and heterogeneous Linux systems. Different widely used open-source tools developed collaboratively in the DORSAL laboratory, such as LTTng, Trace Compass and the Common Trace Format, will be described as well as how they were exploited to quickly find the critical path and uncover hard to find problems in several real industrial systems.