A prediction system may perform capacity planning for one or more resources of a database systems, such as by understanding how different workloads are using the system resources and/or predicting how the performance of the workloads will change when the hardware configuration of the resource is changed and/or when the workload changes. The prediction system may use a detailed, low-level tracing of a live database system running an application workload to monitor the performance of the current database system. In this manner, the current monitoring traces and analysis may be combined with a simulation to predict the workload's performance on a different hardware configuration. More specifically, performance may be indicated as throughput and/or latency, which may be for all transactions, for a particular transaction type, and/or for an individual transaction. Database system performance prediction may include instrumentation and tracing, demand trace extraction, cache simulation, disk scaling, CPU scaling, background activity prediction, throughput analysis, latency analysis, visualization, optimization, and the like.