Ways are disclosed for determining a utilization of a server or group of servers. In one embodiment, a method includes determining a disk utilization factor (DUF) that indicates a utilization of one or more mass-storage disks of some server; determining a processor utilization factor (PUF) that indicates a utilization of one or more processors running on the first server; and based on the DUF and PUF deriving a server-utilization factor (SUF) that indicates a level of utilization of the first server, which includes incorporating one or more of (1) power-usage data or (2) financial-cost data that are associated with each of the disks and processors.