Traditional mechanisms that allow a system to detect and recover from errors are typically wired into applications at the level of code where they are hard to change, reuse, or analyze. An alternative approach is to use externalized adaptation: one or more models of a system are maintained at run time and external to the application as a basis for identifying problems and resolving them. In this paper we provide an overview of recent research in which we use architectural models as the basis for such problem diagnosis and repair. These models can be specialized to the particular style of the system, the quality of interest, and the dimensions of run time adaptation that are permitted by the running system.