It's all about the CMIS - Underpinning the Process (9 of 9)

The example below reiterates that the CMIS provided by some capacity management tools can integrate and store data for reporting and modeling purposes from each sub-process level.

The CMIS enriches the process by bringing the data together for day to day activities and longer term planning.

Proactive Capacity Management with a CMIS

Within a capacity management process there are reactive and proactive elements with the focus on proactivity as the process becomes more mature. 

Capture/store historical data - capturing and storing the data over a longer period of time with the ability to aggregate and filter the data.

Capacity reporting and planning – historical data provides the manager/analyst with the means to refine service and component thresholds for alerting and review how accurate the forecasted models and recommendations are based on the actual data captured.

Metric correlation and alerting - being able to correlate business/service and component metrics together to identify patterns of activity, highlight specific peaks or areas of interest and perform further statistical analysis on the data. 

Police SLA targets - this information can also be accessed by SLM to monitor and police SLA targets and track changes over time.

Summary

So finally to wrap and sum up, the CMIS is an essential part of a capacity management process that provides the focus at the Business and Service levels. 

With the ability to capture and store time-series data from across the enterprise at each sub-process level of Business, Service and Component it provides an enterprise wide view of capacity by underpinning the day to day and forecast/planning activities that a mature process needs to deliver to the organization.

There are a vast range of benefits that implementing a CMIS as part of the process can provide to an organization, such as improved accuracy for purchases and decision making, along with recommendations for CAPEX and OPEX.  By capturing and storing the data for a long period of time it is easily accessible for reporting and planning activities, while providing information to other essential ITSM processes.

Our athene^® Capacity Management software features a single logical database (Capacity Management Information Store – CMIS) where all performance and capacity metrics are stored. Take a look at our other great features and benefits.

https://www.metron-athene.com/products/athene-capacity-management-software/index.html

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

It's all about the CMIS - Why is the CMIS important? (4 of 9)

Why is the CMIS important? For a number of reasons which I've listed below:

Data unification

The CMIS is able to store data captured from many data sources and we are able to start to unify and synchronise the data together. 

Can we confidently ask and answer the following questions, by using a CMIS?

•        Is the data from the same system? 

•        The same date and time? 

•        Can we get a breakdown of user/command usage? 

•        Can we store application statistics?

•        Can we group together in the same service?

•        Do we get response time information and SLA information?

•        Can we integrate data from other ITSM processes?

And many more questions like the above…

Essential for key capacity management activities

The CMIS is essential for key capacity management activities, providing the central source of data for root cause analysis, recurrence and exception reporting and correlation.  It also allows for more accurate trend modeling on aggregated historical data and analytical modeling and planning on workloads for each system and service. 

Supports the Capacity Portal

It also supports the capacity portal by allow for these day to day activities to be performed and providing the data and reports to be hosted within the portal.

Provides the foundation for SKMS

As mentioned earlier, the CMIS and CMS are the foundation of a larger Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) which is primarily about getting the right data to the right people or group. 

•        Analysis

•        Correlation

•        Modelling

•        Demand Management

On Friday I'll be talking about the importance of Correlation. In the meantime don't forget to sign up to our next free webinar 'Evaluating Performance and Capacity with Calculated Metrics'

https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

It's all about the CMIS - What does a CMIS contain? (3 of 9)

A CMIS typically contains capacity and performance related time-series data captured from all sub-process levels.  This data is typically captured and stored to produce recurrence, exception and forecasted reports and plans to the business. 

An example of some of the metrics that should be captured and stored within the CMIS:

•        Component

•        Server information e.g. CPU, memory, disks etc

•        SAN information e.g. Buffer cache, IO Response

•        Application specific metrics

•        Network usage e.g. Port, switch, router

•        Service

•        Service response times

•        Transaction volumes

•        Reliability,  failure rates

•        Business

•        Forecast information

•        Strategy

•        Finance

The information captured can be kept native, filtered, aggregated and used for longer term trend analysis.

Capturing and storing the data into a single system provides many benefits which will be explained throughout this white paper, but notably:

•        Different metrics

•        Same metrics, different sample

•        Combinations of metrics for correlation

The ability to bring information together from the different sub-processes onto a single report or chart allows for correlation analysis to take place, for example whether an increase in the numbers of transaction volumes has an effect on the CPU or Memory utilization or whether business forecasts meet reality.

 The information captured can be kept native, filtered, aggregated and used for longer term trend analysis.

On Monday I'll be discussing why the CMIS is so important.

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

What is a Capacity Management Information System (CMIS)?

Formally referred to as the CMIS, and considered a subset of the Configuration Management System (CMS), it is unlikely to be one physical database and more likely to be a number of logical databases that store capacity and performance related data. Typically data such as utilizations, financial and business statistics with additional relationship information being provided by the CMS.

The principles are the same, except we now have an “Information System” that is considered a Configuration Management DB within the CMS.

The CMIS and CMS are part of a larger Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) which is primarily about getting the right data to the right people or group, with an emphasis on refining the bulk of information into what’s important for a particular person/group.

So, it’s just a database right?

I’ll be dealing with questions like these at my free webinar on February 15 along with taking a look at:

• What are the real challenges in implementing a CMIS?
• What benefits can be expected?
• What does it stand for and why is it known as the cornerstone of the capacity management process?

I’ll also explain how a CMIS provides process governance and helps mature the capacity process through a combination of integration, correlation, reporting and planning.

Register for your place now http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

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