Contention for a resource in a computer system resource is managed by measuring a resource performance metric and, for each of a selected plurality of clients (for example, virtual machines), a client performance metric. For each of the selected clients, a relationship measure, such as correlation, is determined as a function of the resource performance metric and the respective client performance metric. A degree of resource contention effect is determined for each of the selected clients as a function of the respective relationship measure, and a resource-related action is taken according to the respective relationship measures. Clients may include virtualized components contending for storage. Example metrics include functions of I/O operation counts, latency or throughput measurements, pending I/O request counts, I/O throughput relative to I/O latency, a degree of change of the respective clients' I/O behavior, etc. Possible actions include changing resource allocations, access throttling, and reporting, etc.