Tell the adimins that they are aholes as you need to be able to view the perfomance in order to discern the effectiviness of your schema/queries/indexes

if they will not budge go to the upper guys and advise them you need the idera suite for monitoring this will cost quite a bit... If they give it to you you are golden if not then advise you will not be responsible for tuning as the power hungry sys admins are doing their bs power grab again. I was ready for this type of situation and when my network admin replied so what do you want admin rights on the whole system then respond YES I did and having such rights have saved me on several occasions. If that does not work when stuff goes down say you have no access to be able to fix as you are not allowed to view the perfomance as all dbas are.. Then flat out blame the network admin it worked for me