A method that provides for the grouping under a same workload of both application instances in an application tier, and data sharing members in a data tier. This grouping enables a workload manager to make recommendations (to load balancer appliances) about how to distribute workload connections, e.g., based on metrics gathered from both the application and data tiers. In this approach, both applications and data sources are grouped into a workload grouping, and health, status and capacity information about both of these tiers (application and data) is then used to determine an overall distribution policy for the workload. These different tiers can reside on the same or different operating system environments.