1. A computer program product comprising: a computer readable storage medium having computer usable program code embodied therewith, the computer usable program code comprising a computer usable program code configured to: select a probe comprising an instruction sequence, the instruction sequence configured to measure at least one hardware metric; receive a first probe value, the first probe value based, at least in part, on the at least one hardware metric, the first probe value determined from execution of a first instance of the probe in a first execution environment; execute a second instance of the probe to determine a second probe value, the second probe value based, at least in part, on the at least one hardware metric, the second probe value determined in a second execution environment including at least one workload; and compare the first probe value and the second probe value to produce a performance assessment of the second execution environment, the performance assessment based, at least in part, on the comparison of the first probe value with the second probe value.