Abstract. The complexity of today's large-scale enterprise applications demands system administrators to monitor enormous amounts of metrics, and reconfigure their hardware as well as software at run-time without thorough understanding of monitoring results. The Elba project is designed to achieve an automated iterative staging to mitigate the risk of violating Service Level Objectives (SLOs). As part of Elba we undertake performance characterization of system to detect bottlenecks in their configurations. In this paper, we introduce our concrete bottleneck detection approach used in Elba, and then show its robustness and accuracy in various configurations scenarios. We utilize a wellknown benchmark application, RUBiS (Rice University Bidding System), to evaluate the classifier with respect to successful identification of different bottlenecks.