1. A method comprising: determining performance parameters as a function of applied resources for each of a plurality of components of a multi-tier system; modeling the plurality of components as a closed queuing network, wherein at least one of the plurality of components is modeled as a multiple station queuing center representative of a multi-threaded server architecture; modeling service level parameters, wherein the modeling of each service level parameter is determined as a function of at least one of the performance parameters and workload characteristics; and translating service level objectives for the multi-tier system to low-level system metrics using the models of the service level parameters.