This paper defines a methodology for the oracle selection of the monitors and knobs to use to configure an HPC system running a scientific application while satisfying the application's requirements and not violating any system constraints. This methodology relies on a heuristic correlation analysis between requirements, monitors and knobs to determine the minimum subset of monitors to observe and knobs to explore, to determine the optimal system configuration for the HPC application. At the end of this analysis, we reduce an 11-dimensional space to a 3-dimensional space for monitors and a 6-dimensional space to a 3-dimensional space for knobs. This reduction shows the potential and highlights the need for a realistic methodology to help identify such minimum set of monitors and knobs.