The diversity of organometallic reactivity can be traced back to relatively few elementary steps. Hence, a detailed knowledge of these elementary steps is essential for understanding the mechanism of organometallic reactions. Due to the complexity and heterogeneity of most organometallic reagents and catalysts, the observation and characterization of single elementary steps is challenging and requires special techniques. This tutorial presents and discusses different approaches how to probe individual elementary steps, including the analysis of stoichiometric reactions of preformed organometallics, the analysis of the reactivity of electrochemically, radiolytically, or photolytically generated organometallics, single-molecule techniques, experiments on surface-bound organometallic complexes and on organyl groups attached to metal surfaces, as well as gas-phase studies on mass-selected organometallic ions. The examples chosen for illustrating these methods chiefly examine the elementary steps of oxidative addition, transmetalation, and reductive elimination, all of which are of singular importance and together make up the catalytic cycle of transition-metal mediated cross-coupling reactions. Finally, the limitations of strategies focusing only on the analysis of single elementary steps without considering the complexity of the entire reactive system is addressed.