Hardware's a commodity - Why bother managing capacity?(1 of 7)

Many organizations have a Capacity Management process or function in place, but no practical way to assess the effectiveness or even the strengths and weaknesses of the process or function.

This blog series will talk about Capacity Management and how the focus of it has changed in the last two decades – from a technically-oriented process with little interaction with the business to a more people-centric process.

There has also been a huge shift in how IT is done in many companies.  In the past, IT purchases were managed closely, each expenditure carried out after careful deliberation and multiple models predicting the right decision over a host of alternatives.  Today, many IT capacity-oriented purchases are commoditized – interchangeable blades, machines where upgrades involve turning on already-existing processors, or adding capacity to cloud purchases.

As IT becomes more commoditized, the role of the Capacity Manager changes – what value add does the Capacity Manager bring to the organization?  Cost savings aren’t as readily seen and the new technologies are frequently managed by people who think that their role also includes managing capacity and performance.

A smart Capacity Manager today focuses on key areas where he/she can provide value – on relationships with the business which can help negotiate changes in demand for IT services. 

A strong, visible, people-oriented Capacity Manager can find his/her way in today’s IT data center and still provide considerable value to the business.  Without a change in perspective, however, the Capacity Manager faces the possibility of becoming extinct in even the largest of organizations.

What’s changed?  A look back – 1997

•        Mainframes ruled most/many datacenters

•        Teams of people closely monitored capacity and performance

•        Capacity Planning was purely an IT function

•        UNIX just starting to do “real” work

•        Few e-commerce, internet things done

I know that this is one person’s experience, but I can’t help but think it was pretty similar in many larger organizations 20 years ago.

I was hired as part of a 9-person Capacity Planning and Performance Analysis team for a regulated utility.  We had a mainframe (or two) and about 50 production Unix servers.  The Unix systems did nothing that directly interfaced with the clients.
My morning involved showing up for work, making a coffee, and looking painstakingly at charts for the 7 or 8 Unix servers I was responsible for.  Sounds quaint today, I know, but that was the job and I was paid pretty well for a recent PhD program dropout.

In my year with this organization (I left because of the location, not the job), I never once met with anyone from the business.  The Unix machines I looked at were critical pieces of equipment that helped our technicians do their jobs, but back then all customer-facing information was held on the mainframe and customers called people who accessed the information for them.

The explosion of the Internet in the coming years changed everything.  So did the advent of new technologies, new mindsets, and the changing economy played a role as well.

On Wednesday I'll look at what Capacity Management is, in the meantime have a look at our Resources, you'll find a great selection of white papers and on-demand webinars on Capacity Management

https://www.metron-athene.com/resources/index.asp

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer 

It's all about the CMIS - Process Integration with a CMIS (6 of 9)

So why is the CMIS so important?  As mentioned previously, it is known as the cornerstone of Capacity Management. 

It provides the core of the capacity management process by storing and relating the data that enables us to make important capacity and performance related decisions for our services.  The CMIS provides us with the tools to:

·        Collate, unify and correlate important data together

·        Provides the basis to perform key capacity management activities

·        Present information and results back to the business and its strategy.

Such business decisions and strategic directions can be altered or changed based on the information being provided by the Capacity Management process.  The data captured, stored, analyzed and reported, including producing Capacity Plans is presented within the Capacity Portal which should be the focus for the business when making these decisions.

The CMIS provides the ability to integrate data from all other ITSM areas and provides the foundation for the Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS). 

Don't forget to sign up to our next webinar 'Evaluating Performance and Capacity with Calculated Metrics' 

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

 

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

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

I left you with the question on Monday of 'Where does this leave you?' and I guess I have raised as many questions as I have answered. 

This is no surprise as whether or not SaaS is the best model for your Capacity Management depends on your organization and your needs.  The questions are really the same as any outsourcing decision: who will do what and will it be worth the money?.

There are of course some questions that might be a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer for your organization.  If your security policies are such that any capacity data will not be allowed to be transferred out of the business, SaaS is not for you.  Understanding and getting answers to these questions first will save a lot of wasted time and effort considering options.

 
My concern would always be over the intangible area of knowledge.  While I can see a third party being able to meet a regular, standard, repeated reporting requirement, much of the value of Capacity Management is beyond this.  Whenever I visit our clients I am always impressed at the breadth of knowledge the Capacity Management team has across both IT and the business.  It is taking this knowledge and combining it with the raw information produced from technical capacity data that is the source of true Capacity Management value to me.  For this reason alone I can see the value in passing the logistics of Capacity Management to a SaaS provider.  Let them have the delights of keeping software up to date, ensuring there is adequate hardware resource at any time and so on. I would then usually prefer to have the intellectual capital, the use and application of that data allied to knowledge of my own business, kept in-house.  Replacing it will take time and money.

That is just one man’s opinion however.  Your organization might benefit from an expert Capacity Management business managing their capacity issues from cradle to grave, raw data to information to support your business decisions.  In this instance I would always recommend a specialist Capacity Management company with experience to bring.  Their Capacity Management knowledge and experience will be a lot harder to find than a business that can simply provide and maintain infrastructure and software for you.

If there is one area of conclusion therefore, it would be around the issue of expertise.  Whether your Capacity Management is on premise or SaaS, someone needs specialist Capacity Management knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to issues unique to your organization.   Whatever route you take, make sure that experience is on your payroll, or that of your provider.

 

If you don’t, all you might get is data.

Take a look at our SaaS Capacity Management http://www.metron-athene.com/products/athene-capacity-management-software-as-a-service/index.html

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

Is it worth considering SaaS for Capacity Management? (2 of 3)

As I said on Friday 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.

Resources are needed to run in-house software.  These include machine resources such as servers, disks and network to run the chosen or developed products.  Typically today, time is needed from many teams within an IT infrastructure division to get a product up and running.  This can include desktop support, systems administrators, network support, database administrators and more.  A good installation will need Capacity Management to be integrated at a process level with other functions such as Change, Incident and Problem Management.  Getting all the right resources in place to implement and run a product, with effective processes to make sure it runs to the benefit of the business, can be a complex and time consuming task.  It all adds to the cost of that product and the risk of it taking too long see a return on investment.  The costs and involvement of resources and people doesn’t cease with implementation.  On-going support and resources, both IT infrastructure and people, are needed to keep a product delivering what it is intended to deliver.  Done well, it presents an excellent technical solution.  You have a Capacity Management product picked specifically to suit your needs.  You have a team of people, equipped with the right resources, to make the function a successful contributor to the business.

SaaS for your Capacity Management offers benefits that contrast with the software ownership model.  By paying for a service hosted by another supplier in the Cloud, you move so many of those costs on to your supplier.  Which will be the right model for you then becomes an equation. One has to compare the cost for providing those in-house resources against the charges from your SaaS supplier, assuming the end product from the two is the same.

Probably the most common assumption is that you retain the skilled Capacity Management personnel in-house. They can apply their knowledge of your business and its needs to the Capacity Management data managed by the SaaS provider.  Essentially this model transfers the administrative costs of providing a Capacity Management service to the provider.  It becomes their job to ensure there are sufficient processing resources to store and manage your capacity data.  It is their job to make sure the environment in which the software is running and the software itself, with any supporting products, is up to date, maintained and managed effectively.   The costs of providing the infrastructure are passed to the SaaS provider.  This leaves you with zero cost for creating and maintaining your Capacity Management infrastructure and zero cost on other teams within your organization to support it.

Costs are rarely absolutely zero however.  There can be many variations on this basic scenario and each organization will need to decide what suits them best if outsourcing to the Cloud.  The key is usually to define the boundaries where responsibilities meet.  If capacity data is to be captured within your organization and sent to your SaaS provider in the Cloud, one needs to define who has the responsibility for data capture.  There will be agents or agentless software to implement and manage to enable this.  There is the software and network issue of how that data gets to the SaaS provider.  Someone needs to own each part of the process and bear the cost of providing that part of the service.  Who is best placed to do that will vary with each set of needs and resources available.  All this assumes of course that your own in-house security is happy with whatever mechanism is used to pass data outside your organization, and that it’s management outside your organization meets your business standards.

Another key decision in terms of the division of responsibility is who will do the ‘value add’ Capacity Management work.  If your decision to use SaaS is purely to move the cost of maintaining an in-house infrastructure on to someone else, then you will be retaining skilled Capacity Management staff.  They will need access to the Capacity Management software in the Cloud.  Their usage of it will be as if it was an in-house owned and managed product.  They will take the raw data and transform it into the information the business requires.  This can be an efficient and effective model.  Your experienced Capacity Management team are able to leverage their specialist skills to best effect, not lose time doing work that can be better and more cost effectively done by others. 

An alternative is for your SaaS provider to carry out some or all of the skilled Capacity Management work as well as maintaining the environment.  This could provide cheaper labor costs for your organization.  On the flip side, it means you no longer retain that Capacity Management knowledge in-house.  Both its formal and informal value to your business is lost.  In this scenario, what is delivered by the outside organization tends to be highly defined and variations usually mean additional cost.  Aside from the financial concerns, some Capacity Management information cannot be effectively delivered without intimate knowledge of your own organization.  There is always the chance that something is lost if information is delivered by those who don’t have this level of interaction within your business.  It is of course a decision that needs to be right from the start.  Once you lose staff with experience, that knowledge is often gone for good. 

So where does this leave you? I'll conclude by taking a look at this on Wednesday.

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Office

Windows Server Capacity Management 101 - Has the move to Virtualization corrected the issue of under utilized resources?

As I mentioned last week people have got used to the idea of having their own windows systems for their own section of work and have been slow in adopting a more resource sharing attitude - this means that each server is doing very little.

Has the move to virtualization technology corrected this issue?

Virtualization allows multiple Windows systems to run on one physical machine as ‘guests’ under a hypervisor and this in theory should make the physical system utilize more resources but the problem lies in the mentality of the people running the system not the technology. Packing guests together means physical machine utilization should be higher, but a number of problems still persist:

• “MINE!” still prevalent - Being used to having a one server per service environment staff create the same situation with Virtual machines, but now it has been made even easier to have multiple machines and often they’re not even very busy!
• Easy to suffer virtualization sprawl – this is where the number of virtual machines (VMs) on a network reaches a point where the administrator can no longer manage them effectively
• Virtualization sprawl is often for “good reasons” – such as building redundancy into the system, this means if one VM is taken down another one can be put up with virtually no downtime.
• Some organizations rely on high-availability / dynamic resource sharing – Careful Planning is needed to make sure that components of a service do not end up together on the same physical machine as if it fails it takes down a whole service.

So how do we properly capacity manage a Windows environment? I'll be talking about this on Wednesday.

In the meantime sign up for our next webinar 'Capacity Management from the ground-up - a case study'

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

Josh Worth

Consultant

Management Overview Applications (8 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

Let’s move on to what we will see at the management level, particularly for applications. This is called an application summary.

The example summary below shows grouping by category, in this instance by location.

We have a call center, a warehouse, datamart and sales and it shows you that horizontal scale progress through use of color. For each arrival workflow that we have coming in it shows you the progress.

Application Summary

As you can see there are some reds being displayed in this report, the comment section clearly describes what these issues are.

This allows you to clearly display to management the issues, what is causing them and enables you to discuss with them what you are doing about it.

In this case, the warehouse needs some new architecture.

On Friday I'll be discussing resources and costs, in the meantime sign up to our Community and get access to our resources - white papers, Techtips and on-demand webinars.http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

Display of different presentation types (7 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

As discussed today I'll be looking at the types of presentations that you can use.

Below is a selection of them:

Humans like visual representation so using these charts in the right way and gauging which are right to represent the information to your audience is crucial.

Dashboard - More aligned to presenting real time information. The key thing to remember is that any dashboard you use should auto update.

Analysis - Presents the drill down of a problem. This is the root cause analysis, where we know there is a problem and we want to drill down and show what is causing the issue. Where’s the bottleneck? Was there a change?

Advice - Provide some automatic advice, automatic interpretation of the data that you are reporting on.

Virtualization - Report on virtualization data, make it easy to understand what  is happening in your virtual environment.

Business - We have discussed about bringing in business data to the CMIS. Why do we want to do that? We can look for correlations by measuring component data against business metrics and show these in our business reports.

Trending - We can show ‘what-if’ trending which can give you a ‘time to live’ value.

Modeling - More accurate prediction reports to show are modeling reports. You can show things like future system response times or identify where any future bottlenecks are likely to occur.

Breakdown - Shows further analysis on the data in an easy to understand way.

Don't forget the key is to always remember to tailor your presentations to suit your audience.

On Wednesday I'll be dealing with what we will see at the management level. 

There's a great webinar coming soon 'Capacity Planning & Forecasting using analytical modeling', don't miss it!
http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/index.html

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

    

Why carry out a Gap Analysis?

Increasingly organizations need to justify that processes and procedures used throughout the business meet industry standards for good practice, and can be audited and proven to be so. This gives stakeholders in your business and in-house staff the confidence that expenditure in the business is being optimized.

ITIL is the leading approach for good practice in the management of IT infrastructure and its interaction with the business.  By understanding ITIL’s position for all infrastructure management processes and implementing what is appropriate for your organization from within those guidelines,you can justify to stakeholders that your environment is being managed in line with or better than industry expectations.

Effective adoption of the ITIL approach to good practice means understanding what is good and bad in your environment, what is needed to make your organization more effective and bringing these together as a set of processes and procedures that help your business achieve its goals.

Often a gap analysis is undertaken in-house but many organizations are now opting to use external Consultants, as their impartiality is invaluable.  One of the biggest challenges when implementing business level processes is being able to interface with the appropriate areas of an organisation.  The impartiality that external consultants provide, allows for a better dialogue and without the internal politics that may restrict the flow of information.

Our Gap Analysis service helps define your understanding of where you are, where you should be, and how to get there in terms of Service Management and is one of many services that we offer in our Professional Services division.
http://www.metron-athene.com/services/consulting/index.html

Jamie Baker
Principal Consultant

Model – Linux server change & disk change (15 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

Following on from Monday's blog today I'll show the model for change in our hardware.

In the top left hand corner we are showing that once we reach the ‘pain’ point and then make a hardware upgrade the CPU utilization drops back to within acceptable boundaries for the period going forward.

In the bottom left hand corner you can see from the primary results analysis that the upgrade would mean that the distribution of work is more evenly spread now.

The model in the top right hand corner has bought up an issue on device utilization with another disk so we would have to factor in an I/O change and see what the results of that would be and so on.

In the bottom right hand corner we can see that the service level has been fine for a couple of periods and then it is in trouble again, caused by the I/O issue.

Whilst this hardware upgrade would satisfy our CPU bottleneck it would not rectify the issue with I/O, so we would also need to upgrade our disks.

When forecasting modeling helps you to make recommendations on changes that will be required and when they will need to be implemented.

On Friday I'll take a look at some examples of VMware reports.

Charles Johnson
Principal Consultant

 

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 Wednesday.

Wednesday is also the day of our 'Essential Reporting' webinar, if you haven't registered for your place there's still time to.

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

Charles Johnson

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

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 Friday.

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 

What is the Capacity Management Story? Capacity Management, Telling the Story (2 of 17)

•        What is happening in the current environment – this is typically called the baseline. When analyzing data in our systems we want to identify a ‘normal behaviour’ period which shows the demands an application is making on resources in usual circumstances.

•        Concise information – We need to state the facts and not over complicate matters, presenting clear and concise information.

•        Display forecasts – How do we present this story to our audience? In terms of capacity management we could be using forecasting methods such as:

•        Trends

•        Models

We need to describe to our audience so that they can understand easily the point/ message that we are trying to get across to them. We must also ensure that we are getting the right information to the right people in the right way.

•        Gather further information – Do we need to actually gather any additional information or do we have enough information? You may need to supplement resource data with some business data, or perhaps speak to the Service Delivery Managers to get the SLA information.

When we are forecasting it is important to have as much information as possible from the business because we need a full understanding of what we are forecasting to.

On Wednesday I’ll be talking about what we’re  trying to display.

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant