1. A computer-implemented method for examining at least one study class of at least one latency component for an application that is running in a distributed computing system, wherein the at least one study class includes variables that are possible causes of latency degradation for the at least one latency component, the method comprising: determining a latency distribution for each of one or more combinations of values of the variables for the at least one study class; comparing, by at least one processor, the determined latency distributions for the one or more combinations with corresponding latency benchmark values for the same one or more combinations to determine whether a degradation in latency distributions has occurred for particular combinations among the one or more combinations; and providing a result of the comparison.