Capacity Management Maturity, Assesssing & Improving - Setting the Landscape (2 0f 4)

What is Capacity Management?

A fairly standard definition of Capacity Management is:

An IT process that helps ensure capacity meets current and a future business requirements in a cost-­‐effective manner.

A well-­‐defined Capacity Management process will focus on four subprocesses:

Business Capacity Management – translating business needs and plans into capacity and performance requirements for services and infrastructure.

Service Capacity Management – managing the capacity of live, operational IT services. This includes both proactive and reactive activities to ensure SLAs are met.

Component Capacity Management – managing the performance, utilization, and capacity of IT resources and individual IT components

Capacity Management Reporting – To provide other ITSM processes and management with information related to service and component capacity, utilization, and performance

In order to support the process, specific activities (monitoring, analysis, tuning, modeling, etc.) are undertaken in both proactive and reactive ways.

What is Maturity?

A maturity model is a set of structured levels that describe how well the behaviors, practices, and processes of an organization can reliably produce desired outcomes.

Various models exist. For the purposes of this survey, we’ll focus on the Capability Maturity Model, which consists of five levels of process maturity.

I'll tell you the five levels of process maturity in the Capability Maturity Model on Friday.

Come along to my webinar today 'Capacity Management Maturity -Assessing and Improving'

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

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

What is Capacity Management?

The traditional definition of capacity management is as valid today as it ever was.

Capacity management is about balancing service against cost, providing a consistent and acceptable service to the business for a known and controlled cost.

Given a huge budget, service quality can be raised to the highest possible level.  Typically budgets are constrained however so the need then is to provide the best quality of service possible, given these cost constraints.

Capacity management is all about optimizing this balance, knowing what level of service the business needs and identifying how this can be supported for an affordable cost.

The capacity pyramid outlines the key activities involved in capacity management. 

Given availability and capture of raw data, activities range from the reactive day to day tasks of monitoring and alerting through to the more proactive planning tasks such as trending and modeling.  Activities such as analysis to identify root cause of problems and regular, ideally automated, capacity reporting span the gap between the two.

Our proposition has always been that the higher up this pyramid you’re working, the greater value capacity management delivers to the business.  Monitoring and being alerted to problems as they occur is a necessary task, but if that is all that’s done, it falls short of what capacity management should provide.  Finding and fixing a fault means the cost of that fault has already been incurred, both in user impact and resources required to remedy the situation.  Analyzing performance over time, having suitable reports consistently available can help you to understand the environment better and through this, identify and fix issues sooner.

More cost effective however, is to be proactive and identify potential capacity problems before they have impact and then engineer the infrastructure so that those problems don’t occur.

This is the capacity planning element of capacity management and is achieved through a variety of techniques such as trending and extrapolating past performance through to service level modeling of future capacity requirements.

For further reading on capacity management why not join our community and get access to our published papers
http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources/published-papers/login.asp

or register for our next webinar Capacity Management Maturity -Assessing and Improving 
http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/index.html

Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer