What’s VITAL from your Capacity Management provider?

It’s not been uncommon over the years for software vendors in the capacity management sphere to evolve.  They might get bought out, sometimes twice in 2 years, get merged into the product line of a larger business, go out of business altogether or change direction and move away from capacity management.  This blog outlines some of the dangers to users of software products from companies who sell out, go out of business or change direction.

Change can be both good and bad for you as a user of their software.  On the positive side, it might mean the range of functionality in your product gets quickly expanded.  You might benefit from becoming part of a larger user community.  The change might mean your future needs are being anticipated by the provider, seeing what you will need from capacity management before you have that need.

The change is not always in your best interests though.  If the software you have come to rely on isn’t strategic for its new owners, it might be ‘sunsetted’, have little or no further development.  Existing products can come to be seen as ‘cash cows’, mature products from which maintenance revenues to the supplier need to be maximised to fund new initiatives – possibly unrelated to your on-going product needs.  Without development and commitment from their supplier, products slowly wither and die, often while maintenance bills increase.  The human side of change should never be underestimated either.  All the support experience you rely on is often let go.  New management might lack the background of those who originally created the solution you use and want to move what elements of your software they retain in a different direction. 

So, if a supplier of a product you are dependent on sells out or parachutes new management in, you might want to consider a few key questions.  I’m biased, I know. 

Metron has retained a consistent focus throughout our 30 year existence.  The points below contrast our approach to changes in businesses I have seen in my 30 years in capacity management.

Do you really want:

A supplier with…

…executives who don’t know your job?

…a marketing budget pushing the latest craze?

…the products you use being ‘sunsetted’?

…sudden large increases in your maintenance bill?

…the people you rely on to support you being let go?

Probably not.  What you might prefer is:

A solution with a future

If the product you’re using isn’t part of the big new marketing push and re-branding, then it’s not going to get the development you need to keep your Capacity Management process successful.

athene® from Metron remains the company’s core solution and primary focus

A solution delivered by experts

If your solution comes from a company whose executive staff has less than two years’ experience in Capacity Management, chances are they won’t understand your needs.

The least experienced of Metron’s executive team has over 10 years knowledge and experience specifically in capacity management.

An expert team to support you

If new people come in and the experienced and skilled staff that you have come to rely on to support you are released, the pool of knowledge available to help you is lessened.

Metron blends a young and creative software development team with design, consulting, support and management staff who each bring between 10 and 30 years of specific capacity management and planning knowledge to the business.

A financial solution you can trust

In an economy that is only growing slowly, it’s painful if your provider tries to use you as a cash cow with up to 60% increases in the maintenance you pay, to help them develop their new strategy.

Metron rewards the loyalty of its clients, with offers for guaranteed future maintenance commitment and reducing maintenance bills for loyal clients

Something in return for the maintenance you pay

If the products you are licensed for are ‘sunsetted’ by your supplier, although they often won’t state this explicitly, they won’t get the on-going investment to evolve with your needs.  Maybe you’re just paying for their change in strategy or their new offices.

Metron continues to reinvest profits in the on-going development of athene®, as we have done for 30 years.

A product strategy, not just the latest fad

So many companies jump on the latest bandwagon chasing what they see as the easy money.  That often leads to a solution that doesn’t meet the day to day problems you face.  You want a capacity management solution focussed on capacity management, not the latest buzzwords.

Metron works closely with its client base to develop athene® to meet their needs as they change, ensuring continuity of product applicability, helping you always retain your focus on the questions you need to answer now.

Innovation that anticipates what you will need

As your needs evolve, you need a capacity management solution ready to help you meet them.

Ever since helping define the ITIL Capacity Management good practice guidelines, Metron has continuously reinvested profits in ensuring athene® stays ahead of the game.  For example, import of business information and analytics to correlate business and technical data for capacity planning has been a feature of athene® for more than 10 years.

Find out why now is a good time to consider a provider who values Capacity Management more than the latest marketing trend.

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

Metron and our athene® software offer the company focus, strategy, development and product functionality that other capacity management solutions have, plus a few VITAL things that they don’t.

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

Is it worth considering SaaS for Capacity Management? (1 of 3)

SaaS and software purchase

Many people seem to be talking about Software as a Service (SaaS) for many things.  Within my own business we use it for a variety of functions: email, CRM, Help Desk, application lifecycle management – to name just a few.  We like the model and have bought into it where we feel it is the best approach.  Small businesses like ours take pride in our flexibility.  SaaS fits in with this ethos.  Money is always important to a small business.  To have moved so much functionality into Cloud based services, we must feel the cost is good.

As a Capacity Management software and services vendor, we now regularly get asked if we will provide our athene® software in SaaS mode.  Many more people have asked, than have gone forward to implementation.  This got me wondering if and why SaaS is the right delivery mechanism for Capacity Management. 

The comparison I am making is with ownership and running software, third party or developed in-house, on premise.  There is a halfway house, managed services, where the software is installed and run at your premises, but managed by a third party.  I’ll leave the managed services comparison out of things for now, as that is by far the least requested and least implemented model in my experience.

Clearly the most common model for running a capacity management function in the past has been on premise software, either developed in-house or purchased from a third party.  The relevant merits and benefits of those two approaches can be considered another time.  For now, I’ll compare having Capacity Management run as SaaS with both.  SaaS is the new kid on the block, and presumably needs to offer something distinctly better than on premise software if it is to tempt people out of their organization and into the Cloud.

Finance

The main driver for many decisions is cost, and SaaS offers a very different cost model compared to owning software.  It often boils down to a difference between ‘capex’ and ‘opex’, capital expenses and operating expenses.  Is there a cost saving for one compared to the other, or are they just different ways of accounting for money?  Although this can vary by country, the main financial difference between the two can be how they are treated from a tax perspective.  For SaaS, in many tax regimes, 100% of the software charge is tax allowable each year, against a much smaller proportion for purchased software.  For this reason alone, your CFO might prefer SaaS.

There are other related cash benefits.  From a CFO’s perspective, predictable but flexible cash flow is preferred. SaaS offers these things.  Costs are typically flat over whatever period you pay.  After some initial set up charges, payments are often made for shorter periods than software purchase, for example monthly or quarterly.  This contrasts with software purchase, typified by a high initial one time cost and an annual maintenance payment.  Unless a payment schedule is agreed with your supplier, this means a higher upfront cash outlay than for SaaS, irrespective of how the business internally accounts for that expenditure.  Being tied in to annual maintenance paid in advance can mean a business feels there is no flexibility with software ownership.  Once the payment is made, getting any cash back is unlikely.

SaaS offers the promise of being able to flex resources, and therefore expenditure, on much smaller time scales, e.g. monthly, in response to demand.

A final area where SaaS might appeal to your CFO is the speed of the return on investment compared to traditional software ownership.  That big upfront payment for software means you have to use it for some time before the benefits you receive from using it outweigh the money spent.  If you have less money spent upfront and a small monthly payment with SaaS, you cross that line much quicker.  SaaS also offers the promise of being able to downscale your Capacity Management to fit budgets and ensure it provides return on the money spent.  Software purchase means that once the money is spent, it is spent.  If the return on investment isn’t as much as expected, the expenditure side of the equation cannot be adjusted.

It’s not always about the cash…

Running software in-house means more than just buying a product, then sitting back and watching it do your Capacity Management on its own.  If only the world were that simple!  Other factors are needed in place and working well to make Capacity Management successful. I'll deal with this on Monday.

In the meantime take a look at athene^®SaaS  http://www.metron-athene.com/products/athene-capacity-management-software-as-a-service/index.html

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

How to monitor CPU - Windows Server Capacity Management 101(9 of 12)

As promised today we'll be looking at how to monitor CPU.

Thresholds

When dealing with thresholds there is no one size fits all but a good rule of thumb is 70% for a warning and 85% for an alarm these can and should be tweaked when you have a better idea of performance thresholds for your CPU.

Additionally it is good to have a thresholds in place for when a CPU is being under-utilized maybe threshold for 20% and 10% this lets you know which machine could be pushed harder.

Trends

When setting up a trend, you have to remember the longer the trend the less reliable it is. A good rule of thumb for trend is 3 months, as this gives a reasonably reliable trend and also lets you know within time to make a hardware change.

Reports

CPU Total Utilization Estd% - Report Example

Above is an example of an Estimated CPU core busy over a month for my computer with a trend going forward 1 month, you can see quickly that the trend line is going down. This kind of chart is very simple to create with a capacity management tool like athene^®.

On Wednesday I'll be dealing with Memory and how to monitor this. Don't forget to take a look at our workshops, there are some great ones coming up soon

http://www.metron-athene.com/services/online-workshops/index.html

Josh Worth

Consultant

Types of Data required (6 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

Today we'll be looking at the types of data required.

Technical data – in ITIL terms our data should be coming from business, service and resource levels. This data is then fed in to our CMIS and allows us to see what is happening in two ways: 

•        Current – how everything is performing now

•        History – the more historical data we have on our systems and applications the more accurate our trending and modeling will be.

Business metrics – what is happening in the business will dictate the resources needed to support it. 

•        Current – what is happening now in the business

•        Forecast – what is planned for the future, in terms of growth, new services, increased user numbers etc

Key Performance Indicators – we need some idea of how we can measure our performance going forward.

Threshold levels – we need to know what thresholds we are going to be planning towards to enable us to put them on reports and see when/if they are going to be breached.

Capacity Management

 The diagram below shows 360°Capacity Management. A combination of our capacity management software athene^® and SharePath allows you to bring resource, application, application transaction response times, service, business data and KPI’s to your CMIS. This allows you to build the most accurate picture of your environment as you can.

For more details of athene^® and SharePath visit our website.
http://www.metron-athene.com/products/index.html  

On Monday I'll be running through a selection of the types of presentations that you can use. 

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

Capacity Management - What are we trying to tell the business?

Interacting with customers sometimes throws up a question we’re sure we should know the answer to, but ends up being not as simple to answer as we’d expected.  One of those questions that really makes us sit down and ponder how to answer it.

So here’s my question:  As a Capacity Manager, what am I trying to tell the business?

Am I trying to tell them about Utilizations? Headroom? Risk? Costs? Customer Service?

There are so many things I could be telling the business it’s hard to say “This is what I’m providing to the business”.

It struck me that if I can’t provide the answer then maybe I’m trying to answer the wrong question.  Rather than dictate to the business what I can tell them doesn’t it make more sense to be asking them, “What is it that you want to know?”

As part of maturing their Capacity Management processes one of our clients is doing just that. They are successfully engaging with all manner of business units within their organization, showing them the sorts of things they can do and then asking the question.  “What information do you want to have? What is actually going to be helpful/useful to you?”  That might be a single metric on the intranet capacity report, or something with a lot more detail.

There are probably 3 main factors that have come into play in this successful initiative.

1.     The implementation of a Capacity Management tool, athene®, that gives them the ability to easily import and report on the metrics the business units are interested in.  Be that Searches, Transaction Response times, Transaction counts – in fact any time date stamped metrics that they want.  Whatever that part of the business considers to be the most important metric(s) to them.

2.     Integration with a real user monitoring APM tool.  Being able to see exactly what the customers (internal and external), are doing and experiencing.

3.     Having a member of staff on the capacity team who has a business background and the social skills to match.  Someone who can engage with the right people, who knows what they are currently doing to get their stats and who can learn how to integrate them with the platform statistics (CPU, Memory etc).

Bringing these factors together has resulted in heightening the profile of the Capacity Management Team and showing their real value to the business. Business units are now approaching them and asking for data to be included because they want the same advantages they see other departments getting from the data.

So what are we trying to tell the business?  I’m here, and I’ve got some really great stuff I can do to help you.  What is it you want to know?

Don't miss out on our Capacity Management 101 online workshop taking place in June.

http://www.metron-athene.com/services/online-workshops/index.html

Phil Bell

Consultant

The perils of the wrong type of aggregation

Looking at data and picking out the “story” it tells is often as much an art as a science when it comes to Capacity Management.  A gentle disbelieving of anything you are told also often makes for a better and quicker outcome than taking everything on face value.  Here’s a recent anecdote.

A customer raised an issue with Metron that after a software upgrade a database re-index job was taking a long time and that the application using the database had been working really slowly.  A hasty conference call / screen-sharing session was set up with us, the customer, his boss, and a SQL Server database administrator.  The conversation started with words to the effect of “this started after the upgrade, what’s going on?” - so we looked and we talked for a little while, then it came out that the database re-index job failed because it ran out of disk space.  The next comment “has the database got bigger because of the upgrade, then?”  That’s not our experience, but you never know….so we looked at a graph of the database size over time with a nice simple trend line over the top – the customer had already had this to hand. It looked a little like this:

With the disk size confirmed as 600 GB what was going on? This clearly shows housekeeping of the database as it grows, is shrunk down, grows again.  Even the trend line appears to be going down slightly.  The upgrade occurred in mid-April, so there was clearly no obvious jump up in database size at that time. 

The clue was the x-axis of the graph.  The dates were just the beginning of each month.  The chart seemed to have a nice neat shape to it – too neat, perhaps?

Looking further into the chart, the data was aggregated from the original 15 minute intervals up to the average for an entire day.  So what happens when we plot a chart of some of the later data points, showing each interval instead of the aggregated ones?

When did the re-index job start?…at 07:00 on May 1st.

That’s what polished off the remaining disk space.  The DBA killed the job and manually shrank the database at about 12:00.  During the time the disk had become full, and the application using this database detected this shortage of disk space and shut itself down to avoid losing data.  Only when it was restarted, which was some time after the space had been freed up, did it carry on.

Looking back at previous weekends the shape of the graph was the same each time - gently rising disk usage with a sharp, usually short increase during the time the re-index was taking place, dropping back to previous levels afterwards.

The previous weeks had survived, just, in those cases, so no-one had noticed how close the limit the disk space had become.  Now some more disk space has been added to cater for these weekly “spikes”, and the customer has a better handle on the growth rate of the database and the effect of the necessary but heavy weekly database maintenance.

Having the ability to aggregate large quantities of data into a simplified overview is useful for some things, but you do need to consider the “story” you are trying to tell with the resulting numbers.  Instead of an average of a large set of numbers that lowered the effective number, perhaps the better aggregation would have been something like “the peak value per day”, or “the aggregated hour containing the peak value”.  A straight average in this case hid the issue from sight, even with a trend line to try and predict how things were moving.

Metron’s athene® makes visualizing data simple, quick and intuitive and helps to keep your systems running by giving you that “over the horizon” view of what’s coming up, helping you run IT systems with no capacity surprises and having time to think about the best solution for the way ahead.

http://www.metron-athene.com/products/athene/index.html

Nick Varley

Chief Services Officer