1. A method for determining an effect of a proposed configuration change on a transaction basis to at least one element in a distributed computer system comprising the steps of: initiating a set of instrumented synthetic transactions in the distributed computer system; tracking access to managed resources by synthetic transactions to produce a list of utilized resources for the transaction; and categorizing the utilized resources according to criteria including associating the utilized resources with respective transactions; repeating the initiating, tracking, and categorizing steps after a proposed configuration change using a selected subset of the set of transactions; and displaying an effect of the proposed configuration change for the selected subset of the set of transactions.