In general, the present invention provides a method, system and program product for approximating/estimating computer resource consumption of a computer system. Specifically, under the present invention, a more efficient or reduced computer work gradient matrix (hereinafter “matrix”) is first built. This occurs by creating load measurements for a set of computer resource metrics of the computer system to analyze dependencies between different computer resource metrics. Then, a correlation matrix between the set of computer resource metrics is created based on the dependencies. The set of computer system resource metrics in the correlation matrix is thereafter clustered into a set of clusters, and a reduced matrix is built based thereon. Once the reduced matrix is built, it can be restored to a “full” matrix using linear transformation or the like.