A method, system, and computer program product for of configuring cloud computing platforms. One such method serves for recommending alternative computing architectures for a selected application using automated instrumentation of the application under an abstracted workload. The method commences by measuring workload characteristics of the selected application using pre-determined performance parameters. Additional performance parameters to be measured are selected based on previous measurements, and further analysis includes instrumenting the application to provide measurement instruments corresponding to the respective selected additional performance parameters. Such hardware- or software-based instruments are used for determining a baseline set of performance metrics by measuring the performance of the selected application on a first (e.g., currently-in-use) computing architecture, then, measuring the performance of the application on other proposed computing architectures. Charts and reports are used for
