Today, grid computing has become an important component in distributed computing and has lead to rapid advances in many disciplines. Consequently, many novel methods and applications have been proposed for trace analysis in grid systems to better facilitate users' need for grid computing. In this survey, we investigate recent advances in grid trace analysis; discuss advantages and limitations of these fruitful works; and summarize a general framework for trace analysis. We discuss various applications of trace analysis and also show that the methods with integrations of several effective models and techniques tend to perform well.