Modeling Scenario (14 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

I have talked about bringing your KPI’s, resource and business data in to a CMIS and about using that data to produce reports in a clear, concise and understandable way.

Let’s now take a look at some analytical modeling examples, based on forecasts which were given to us by the business.

Below is an example of an Oracle box, we have been told by the business that we are going to grow at a steady rate of 10% per month for the next 12 months. We can model to see what the impact of that business growth will be on our Oracle system.

In the top left hand corner is our projected CPU utilization and on the far left of that graph is our baseline. You can see that over a few months we begin to go through our alarms and our thresholds pretty quickly.

Model – oracleq000 10% growth – server change

In the bottom left hand corner we can see where bottlenecks will be reached indicated by the large red bars which indicate CPU queuing.

On the top right graph we can see our projected device utilization for our busiest disk and we can see that within 4 to 5 months it is also breaching our alarms and thresholds.

Collectively these models are telling us that we are going to run in to problem with CPU and I/O.

In the bottom right hand graph is our projected relative service level for this application. In this example we started the baseline off at 1 second, this is key.

By normalizing the baseline at 1 second it is very easy for your audience to see the effect that these changes are likely to have. In this case, once we’ve added the extra workload we can see that we go from 1 second to 1.5 seconds (a 50% increase) and then jumped from 1 second to almost 5 seconds. From 1 to 5 seconds is a huge increase and one that your audience can immediately grasp and understand the impact of.

We would next want to show the model for change in our hardware and I'll be looking at this on Friday.

In the meantime why not join our Community and get access to a wealth of Capacity Management Resources http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources/

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

What are we attempting to display? ( 3 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

When we’re telling our capacity management story what are we trying to display?

•         Display current state of the environment – this is our baseline, a period or periods which reflect our normal pattern of behavior. You need an understanding of the business to class a period as ‘normal’ behavior.

•         Display possible anomalies – this involves looking at periods and determining whether the peaks in a set period of time are an anomaly or whether they are just normal user busy periods of the day, explaining peaks in the data. Has there been some kind of change made that you are aware of? You may need to perform some root cause analysis to get to the bottom of peaks where you don’t already have an understanding of what is causing them.

•         Display forecasts

•     Trends – are very useful. You can trend to a limit, you can trend to a threshold etc but if you wish to get a better degree of accuracy to your forecasting you may wish to model.

•         Models – analytical modeling can provide you with a better degree of accuracy when  forecasting, especially when it comes to things like utilizations where you have to take in to consideration the utilization curve.

Are there different stories for different audiences? I’ll be dealing with this on Monday.

In the meantime register for our community and get access to free capacity management white papers, on-demand capacity management webinars and more

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

 

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant