updates to slos 102 by users and business applications by using performance data for long term capacity provisioning the process 200 may be less manually intensive and as a result require less specific performance modeling and capacity planning efforts than prior art provisioning techniques moreover because the process 200 is automated in real time provisioning policies 304 can be quickly updated based on feedback of how applications 114 perform against the attributes of the slos 102 further details related to the automated system and process are shown in fig2 b as schematically shown by a graph performance data 250 collected and stored in data repository 180 can include historical as well as real time cpu utilization data for each of the various servers 112 of the computer system 100 and may have been collected for weeks or months from computer system 100 as discussed previously recommendation tool 300 analyzes this performance data 250 and generates an operational profile in embodiments discussed previously the operational profile can characterize service levels in computer system 100 in a certain configuration and having a certain capacity such as response times of servers when subjected to given workloads or the ability of servers to process given workloads or throughputs in the present embodiment operational profile characterizes resource usage of computer system 100 over time so that it can be termed a resource usage profile such as schematically shown by graph 260 this resource usage profile 260 captures workload oriented information.