360° Capacity Management – looking at capacity and performance from every angle ( 5 of 7)

In the last installment, we talked about 360° Capacity Management – looking at capacity and performance from every angle.  Sounds like a daunting task, but it isn’t as long as you have a way to get disparate sets of capacity and performance data into an easy-to-mine data repository.

And, not to dig too deeply into the nuts and bolts, there can be a lot of different types of data – from mainframes, servers, storage, networks, databases, applications, facilities, and key end-user experience metrics that tell your analysts whether or not your customers should be happy.

ITIL refers to this repository (or set of repositories) as the Capacity Management Information Store or CMIS.  It’s a key component of 360° Capacity Management because the views from every angle not only need to be available, they need to be available historically – you need to know how things are changing over time.

A key requirement of a practical CMIS is the ability to import data from a wide variety of source in an easy and automated way.  Metron has always believed that this is a key feature of a quality CMIS and therefore builds this capability into athene® -- our flagship Capacity Management solution.

Regardless of which Capacity Management solution you use, the ability to bring data from these disparate sources into a single pane of glass is vital.  Automated reports can give a day-to-day and a historical picture of your capacity and performance from every possible angle.  Having these different angles available at any given moment allows the analyst to quickly determine the root cause of performance and capacity incidents.  The historical data as well as some predictive trending and modeling tools help the analyst be proactive in order to minimize these types of incidents going forward. 

Minimizing capacity issues while also right-sizing an environment saves real money – both from not losing customers due to capacity and performance incidents and by also delaying purchases until they are truly needed.

On Monday we’ll take a closer look at the types of data you’ll need and give you some real world examples of products that can provide these types of data.

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer