Autonomic management strives to ensure that systems and applications operate as expected. Policies can be used to express required or desired behavior of systems and applications and so can be used to specify to an autonomic management system the expected operational characteristics of these systems. Such policies can be captured and mapped into autonomic management actions, providing the kinds of directives on which an autonomic management system can rely in order to meet requirements. In this paper, we look at how such techniques can be applied to manage the Apache web server in the context of self-configuration, selftuning, and overall optimization of resource use. Specifically, we look at how policies are defined and how they are realized as actions driving autonomic management.