Approaches for manage and measuring workload on computer resources by measuring workload in ways that are independent of physical hardware and that correlate to ways in which it is desirable to measure and manage workload for applications and clients. Specifically, logical abstractions of workload, referred to as services, are defined for a cluster of nodes running a multi-node database server of a database. A service is a category of work hosted on a subset of multi-node database servers, such as work that is performed for an online order entry application. The workload is measured and demarcated by the service no matter which node in a single or multi-node system performs the service, providing a global view of performance realized by the system.