Capacity Management
The Capacity Management process in ITSM is defined as the process that ensures the capacity of the IT infrastructure can meet the demands of the business in the most cost effective manner. The goal of Capacity Management is to prevent performance bottlenecks from impacting Service Availability or Performance pro-actively. This requires a process of comparing actual utilization with documented capacity thresholds in a near real-time fashion.
Utilization should be measured for all hardware (servers, mainframes, etc.), networking equipment (routers, VPN concentrators, firewalls, etc.), software (database applications, enterprise applications including homegrown systems) and human resources. By monitoring trends in resource utilization, utilization anomalies can be identified, which are early indicators of threatened Service Level misses.
Some organizations consider installing dedicated monitors on individual hardware and software components to monitor Resource utilization. This could be a hugely time consuming and expensive. External monitors can negatively impact resource performance and require expensive maintenance and upkeep. In addition, no monitor can report the whole picture. It is no surprise that in many organizations, the first time administrators engage in Capacity Management is when they receive complaints from users about Service performance. In other situations, a sample set of resources is monitored to approximate utilization. The bad news: all individual resources have finite capacity, which, when exceeded, will threaten service availability or performance.
The good news: nearly all IT resources already have built-in instrumentation in the form of log data. Logging just needs to be turned on. Log data, when combined with automated aggregation, alerting and reporting, provides a complete and cost-effective record of system activity and utilization. In fact, since the same Log Intelligence infrastructure is used for seven other ITSM processes, the incremental costs of Capacity Management are near-zero.
The activities as part of Capacity Management that can be supported by log data are:
- Planning for IT Resource Capacity to meet the needs of the business
- Monitoring of utilization of IT resources
- Tuning resources for optimal efficiency and performance