A Service-Level Agreement (SLA) provides surety for specific quality attributes to the consumers of services. However, current SLAs offered by cloud infrastructure providers do not address response time, which, from the user’s point of view, is the most important quality attribute for Web applications. Satisfying a maximum average response time guarantee for Web applications is difficult for two main reasons: first, traffic patterns are highly dynamic and difficult to predict accurately; second, the complex nature of multi-tier Web applications increases the difficulty of identifying bottlenecks and resolving them automatically. This paper proposes a methodology and presents a working prototype system for automatic detection and resolution of bottlenecks in a multi-tier Web application hosted on a cloud in order to satisfy specific maximum response time requirements. It also proposes a method for identifying and retracting over-provisioned resources in multi-tier cloud-hosted Web applications. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in an experimental evaluation with a testbed EUCALYPTUS-based cloud and a synthetic workload. Automatic bottleneck detection and resolution under dynamic resource management has the potential to enable cloud infrastructure providers to provide SLAs for Web applications that guarantee specific response time requirements while minimizing resource utilization