What is Capacity Management?

The traditional definition of capacity management is as valid today as it ever was.

Capacity management is about balancing service against cost, providing a consistent and acceptable service to the business for a known and controlled cost.

Given a huge budget, service quality can be raised to the highest possible level.  Typically budgets are constrained however so the need then is to provide the best quality of service possible, given these cost constraints.

Capacity management is all about optimizing this balance, knowing what level of service the business needs and identifying how this can be supported for an affordable cost.

The capacity pyramid outlines the key activities involved in capacity management. 

Given availability and capture of raw data, activities range from the reactive day to day tasks of monitoring and alerting through to the more proactive planning tasks such as trending and modeling.  Activities such as analysis to identify root cause of problems and regular, ideally automated, capacity reporting span the gap between the two.

Our proposition has always been that the higher up this pyramid you’re working, the greater value capacity management delivers to the business.  Monitoring and being alerted to problems as they occur is a necessary task, but if that is all that’s done, it falls short of what capacity management should provide.  Finding and fixing a fault means the cost of that fault has already been incurred, both in user impact and resources required to remedy the situation.  Analyzing performance over time, having suitable reports consistently available can help you to understand the environment better and through this, identify and fix issues sooner.

More cost effective however, is to be proactive and identify potential capacity problems before they have impact and then engineer the infrastructure so that those problems don’t occur.

This is the capacity planning element of capacity management and is achieved through a variety of techniques such as trending and extrapolating past performance through to service level modeling of future capacity requirements.

For further reading on capacity management why not join our community and get access to our published papers
http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources/published-papers/login.asp

or register for our next webinar Capacity Management Maturity -Assessing and Improving 
http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/index.html

Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer