Designing reliable software for sensor networks is challenging because application developers have little visibility into, and understanding of, the post-deployment behaviorof code executing on resource constrained nodes in remoteand ill-reproducible environments. To address this problem,this paper presents HERMES, a lightweight framework and prototype tool that provides fine-grained visibility and control of a sensor node’s software at run-time. HERMES’sarchitecture is based on the notion of interposition, which enables it to provide these properties in a minimally intrusive manner, without requiring any modification to software applications being observed and controlled. HERMES providesa general, extensible, and easy-to-use framework forspecifying which software components to observe and controlas well as when and how this observation and control is done. We have implemented and tested a fully functional prototype of HERMES for the SOS sensor operating system. Our performance evaluation, using real sensor nodesas well as cycle-accurate simulation, shows that HERMES successfully achieves its objective of providing fine-grained and dynamic visibility and control without incurring significant resource overheads. We demonstrate the utility and flexibility of HERMES by using our prototype to design, implement,and evaluate three case-studies: debugging and testing deployed sensor network applications, performing transparent software updates in sensor nodes, and implementingnetwork traffic shaping and resource policing.