In large-scale distributed systems, the interactions of many independent components may lead to emergent global behaviors with unforeseen, often detrimental, outcomes. The increasing importance of distributed systems such as clouds and computing grids will require analytical tools to understand and predict, complex system behavior to ensure system reliability. In previous work, we described how a piecewise homogeneous Discrete Time Markov chain representation of a computing grid can be systematically perturbed to predict situations that lead to performance degradations.