Trends - Windows Server Capacity Management 101 (4 of 12)

The purpose of trending is predicting what will happen by what has happened, the accuracy of trends rely on what is happening will carry on happening into the future.

Importance of trends – A trend gives you warning if your demand is going to outstrip then your supply and gives you chance to act.

How long to trend forward - As with most things there is no one size fits all. When deciding on the length of trends it is important to take a few things into consideration such as how long it takes you to buy and install new hardware. There is no point in trending forward on disk space for a week if it takes you 2 months to get additional space.

So a good length of a trend is how long it takes you to procure, physically install and configure new hardware, if this take 3 month then that is how long your trends should be.  

Trending is good at predicting when something will hit a threshold but not telling you what will happen when it does, this is where modeling comes in.

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Importance of modeling - it allows you to see how a system will react under different workloads. If the business has an event coming up that means it servers are going to be under higher than normal load you want to be able to reassure people that the system can handle it.

·      What modeling shows - Modeling will show you how your components will perform under different workloads, and what component will fail and when.

Modeling is used frequently for ‘what if’ scenarios such as “What if my workload increases 30% will my system handle the extra load or will it fail? If it does where will it fail?”

Knowing this lets you be proactive instead of reactive.

On Wednesday I'll be looking at Service versus Cost. Talking of Wednesday we've got a great webinar lined up for you 'Capacity Management from the ground-up' ..don't miss it! http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/index.html

Josh Worth

Consultant