The dependability community has worked on the principled engineering of distributed fault-tolerant architectures for more than a decade. This paper presents one of the first approaches to bring together language-inspired approaches (reflection) with architectural consideration (multi-layer COTS-based systems) in this context. The article describes how probes and actuators should be inserted in the multiple layers of a system to support families of fault-tolerance mechanisms, and can be seen as a forerunner of the current work done on Aspect-Oriented Component-Based systems. This work was presented at DSN-2003, the premier conference for dependability computing. RAE_import_type : Conference contribution RAE_uoa_type : Computer Science and Informatics