A pager
What the capacity manager shouldn’t be concerned about is an on-line real or near real-time dashboard. If the information is getting refreshed on the performance side of that grey line that divides current and future issues, it’s not a capacity management issue. If someone wants to know what their CPU utilization is at a given moment in time, tell them the truth: it is either 0% or 100%. Leave reporting that to the system administrators.
If they want to know what it will be next month if the marketing department runs the planned advertising campaign, look at the capacity dashboard/portal/report.
Does anyone still have one? A Capacity Manager shouldn’t need a pager or whatever has replaced the pager in the modern age. As I mentioned in a previous blog, there is a grey line somewhere that separates performance monitoring and system administration from capacity management. The Performance Manager or Systems Adminstrator needs a pager or other means of alerting them to a crisis. The Capacity Manager should be operating on the other side of the grey line, beyond day to day crises, looking ahead to see how those crises can be more effectively avoided in the future.
A dashboardMore contentious certainly, as many view a dashboard as a reporting mechanism for any reports.
A capacity manager might well want to set up a reporting dashboard for recipients of information about capacity issues. It could equally be called a portal, framework or something else – in essence it is just the modern form of the periodic capacity report. What the capacity manager shouldn’t be concerned about is an on-line real or near real-time dashboard. If the information is getting refreshed on the performance side of that grey line that divides current and future issues, it’s not a capacity management issue. If someone wants to know what their CPU utilization is at a given moment in time, tell them the truth: it is either 0% or 100%. Leave reporting that to the system administrators.
If they want to know what it will be next month if the marketing department runs the planned advertising campaign, look at the capacity dashboard/portal/report.
A fire hose
Again, as per my previous blogs around this topic, capacity management is about knowing how many fire hoses to have in place, where to place them, what chemicals to have in them and more. Putting the protective suit on and pointing the fire hose is for performance managers and system adminstrators. A good maxim for a capacity manager is:
If I’m reacting to incoming user complaints about poor performance, I have already failed.”In economically challenged times, the fault can lie with management. There is clearly knowledge overlap between a performance manager and capacity manager. There can also be product overlap as well, as both need to rely on similar or even the same sources of data to do their job.
Putting the responsibility for both tasks on one set of shoulders is too large a burden however. Something has to give, and it will usually be the longer term proactive management of systems in favour of the short term crisis resolution. The shame is that the longer term view offers much more effective management and reduction of costs than the former.
In the next of this series on Monday we'll look at things that can make the job of the capacity manager harder to do successfully.
Browse and download white papers on capacity management by joining our Metron community
Andrew Smith
Chief Sales & Marketing Officer
No comments:
Post a Comment