A system and method for performing a hypothetical power management analysis on a distributed computer system uses chronologically consecutive snapshots of the distributed computer system. The snapshots are used to extract demands of clients running in the distributed computer system for a resource for different time intervals, which are then stitched together to produce a workload trace. The snapshots and the workload trace are used to construct modeling scenarios for the distributed computer system. The modeling scenarios are used to perform analyzes to simulate the operation of the distributed computer system during which the power management module is enabled to compute potential power savings.