This paper presents a COTS- (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) oriented view of the embedded systems design space. It summarizes a set of frameworks capturing a significant portion of this design space along with a selected set of methods. These methods enable engineers to easily generate and quantitatively evaluate points within the design space. This paper also briefly discusses the design space navigation problem. The frameworks and methods are restricted to address performance/resource management issues. This paper shows how the design capture frameworks can establish and maintain performance baselines for large-scale, long-life, embedded systems.- This research was supported in part by grants from the Office of Naval Research, Texas Instruments, Lockheed Martin Corporation, and IBM.