The need for service differentiation in Internet services has motivated interest in controlling multi-tier web applications. This paper describes a tier-to-tier (T2T) management architecture that supports decentralized actuator management in multi-tier systems, and a testbed implementation of this architecture using commercial software products. Based on testbed experiments and analytic models, we gain insight into the value of coordinated exploitation of actuators on multiple tiers, especially considerations for control efficiency and control granularity. For control efficiency, we show that more effective utilization of tiers can be achieved by using actuators on the bottleneck tier rather than only using actuators on the entry tier. For granularity of control (the ability to achieve a wide range of service level objectives) we show that a fine granularity of control can be achieved through a coordinated, cross-tier exploitation of coarse grained actuators (e.g., multiprogramming level), an approach that can greatly reduce controllerinduced variability.