The disclosed embodiments provide a system for analyzing data from a monitored system. During operation, the system identifies a difference between a performance of an application and a service-level agreement (SLA) of the application. Next, the system determines a correlation between the performance of the application and a disk input/output (I/O) performance of a data storage device used by the application. When the correlation exceeds a threshold, the system outputs a recommendation to migrate the application between the data storage device and a different type of data storage device.