Data centres are playing a pivotal role in all cloud-based services (e-commerce, social networks, financial services, e-government, etc.). The performance of data centres is crucial for the acceptance of all these services by end-users. It is important to carefully design data centres with both performance and energy considerations in mind, as data centres are also known to use large amounts of electrical energy. For that purpose we have developed a modular simulation model (based on Anylogic) that can be used to study performance-energy trade-offs in data centre design. Key to such studies is the availability of a workload model. In this paper we present a workload characterisation model and algorithm using modern-day data science techniques, building on top of Jupyter Notebook and the ProFiDo platform. We present the method and show its versatility on a case study with real-world traces of 20 million entries, provided by the Dutch company better.be. CCS CONCEPTS• Theory of computation → Design and analysis of algorithms; • Computing methodologies → Modeling and simulation; Simulation evaluation;