There is an increasing interest in understanding and analyzing the use of resources in software and hardware systems. Certifying memory consumption is vital to ensure safety in embedded systems as well as proper administration of their power consumption; understanding the number of messages sent through a network is useful to detect performance bottlenecks or reduce communication costs, etc. Assessing resource usage is indeed a cornerstone in a wide variety of software-intensive system ranging from embedded to Cloud computing. It is well known that inferring, and even checking, quantitative bounds is difficult (actually undecidable). Memory consumption is a particularly challenging case of resource-usage analysis due to its non-accumulative nature. Inferring memory consumption requires not only computing bounds for allocations but also taking into account the memory recovered by a GC. In this talk I will present some of the work our group have been performing in order to automatically analyze heap memory requirements. In particular, I will show some basic ideas which are core to our techniques and how they were applied to different problems, ranging from inferring sizes of memory regions in real-time Java to analyzing heap memory requirements in Java/.Net. Then, I will introduce our new compositional approach which is used to analyze (infer/verify) Java and .Net programs. Finally, I will explain some limitations of our approach and discuss some directions for future research.