Method and apparatus for separating background utilization from
transaction resource consumption to simulate resource costs on system
servers including a computer application server is taught. Transaction
throughput combined with resource consumption data. Regression analysis
on the resulting data set provides information useful for determining
performance and for creating discrete event simulations. In a first
embodiment, data from an application server is combined with the
application transaction log to find a background utilization on the
application servers and to simulate transaction resource cost with a
background load. In a second embodiment, data from servers other than the
application server are combined with the application transaction log to
estimate the resource cost per transaction for a given resource in the
system. In a third embodiment, data from servers other than the
application server are combined with the application transaction log to
simulate resource cost for a given resource based on transaction
throughput.