All ITSM objectives are important, but the key objective is often forgotten

On Friday we began to look at whether or not capacity management has relevance in a world of rapidly configurable, cheap hardware.  Let’s consider this further.

There are five ‘So-called Objectives’ of IT Service Management. These are ‘so-called objectives’ because they identify an ideal. Reality is very different.

All ITSM objectives are important, but the key objective is often forgotten. The ultimate objective is to increase revenue and profit and this is its true contribution to the business sphere.

Everybody concerned with business has to address the twin problems of increasing productivity while reducing costs. This is the ultimate goal of ITSM and it is affected by five main factors:

• increase productivity

• reduce costs

• do new things

• win competitions

• provide IT services.

The big question is how to increase Revenue and Profit and there are two main strategies:

 • Do something new creating new products or services, or expanding into new markets.

• Differentiate yourself from competitors, in order to hold a dominant position and beat

their attempts to control the market.

By being effective in these two areas the company will increase productivity and reduce costs.

The important point is that IT service provision can help and support these areas.

Employers’ misgivings about IT investment are in these first two areas and to answer that, we must explain how the IT service contributes to the business itself.

It's important to divide IT services into direct and indirect, as related to business results. So we should divide IT into two groups:

 • IT services that have a direct influence outside the company such as on customers, clients and partner companies.

• IT services that influence only internal users within the company.

We then need to prepare an explanation for management of the degree of contribution that each IT servicemakes in order to reach the right decisions.

This brings benefit in that we can prioritize the service level of each IT service based on the importance to the business, so that then we can control the service level according to the business priority.

In this way, meaningful reports can be produced and presented to help in business decision making.

This is how capacity management becomes proactive and makes a major contribution to the business.
Capacity management done reactively and passively is inherently done badly and also makes it seem an overhead to be minimised.

Adam Grummitt

Distinguished Engineer

In these days of limited resources and tightened budgets, every IT Service Management (ITSM) activity has to be tuned to meet real demands and provide valuable services.

Capacity Management is usually viewed as a combination of various techniques addressing performance and capacity. The teams typically involved come from various areas such as development, testing, domain architects, systems programmers and others (possibly including capacity management specifically), depending on the nomenclature used in the organization.

There are some ITSM activities, such as the service desk and event management, that are typically viewed as necessary. Many other ITSM activities are viewed as desirable but not always implemented such as demand management and service level management. There are also some ITSM activities that are perceived by many as peripheral or an unnecessary overhead, such as capacity planning, modelling, software performance engineering, performance measurement and performance testing.

Given this situation, it would seem to be the right time to ask which capacity management activities should be done, and when, if at all.

Capacity Planning and performance measurement and testing is certainly getting more challenging with multi-tiered applications, virtualization of many types and cloud computing. Over the last few years, many will say that the cost of adding more hardware is significantly less than the cost associated with measurements, testing and modelling so why bother. As virtualization is becoming more prominent, this attitude seems to be increasing.

It is even viewed as possible to use a virtualization pool to avoid the whole planning process. Advocates of this approach would point out that it is often very hard to get good business transaction measurements and forecasts.

When the business becomes as dynamic as the virtual infrastructure, they feel that the only salvation is rapid reaction instead of methodical planning.

Yet many capacity planners have watched management buy round after round of “cheap” hardware and spend ever more on deluxe solutions for routine applications. The total cost of ownership is nowadays determined as much by software licences and system support (including accommodation and power) as the hardware itself. Furthermore, the performance after such upgrades may well stay the same, that is to say poor, and overall costs skyrocket.

Some form of planning is clearly needed but how do you strike the right balance?

Companies really can’t afford to use the same methodology for a single $5K mini-server as they do for a $5M super-server or mainframe, but what about small servers across the enterprise? Where is the crossover? Is it always the same for every company? Is it always the same within a single company?

Does everything merit the same level of Service Management? What happened to demand management? Catch more on Monday.....

Adam Grummitt

Distinguished Engineer and Author ‘Capacity Management – A Practitioner Guide’

http://www.itgovernance.co.uk/products/3077

A selection of more white papers are available for free download http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/index.html

Effective Capacity Management – bringing IT and Business together

The need to consider a unified approach to Capacity Management is valid and urgent now, as the complexity in infrastructure increases.

Each technological change, such as virtualization or Cloud, tends to bring the addition of a point solution, in capacity and other areas of infrastructure management.

More point solutions means it becomes more difficult to maintain consistent and unified processes for tasks such as capacity and change management across the enterprise. 

This breadth of coverage for an ever more diverse environment is a concern that needs to be addressed.  With the widespread implementation of virtual technology, often now to enable Cloud computing to be adopted, managing capacity is a major concern.

As businesses migrate to a mix of private and public Clouds, with infrastructure resources under varying degrees of control for the organization, there are valid concerns about:

-           Planning what resources are really needed

-           Deciding how best to provision those resources

-           Ensuring those resources are used effectively

The total capacity management coverage and clear advice on process available from Metron removes the need for these concerns. 

Advice is available on how to implement capacity management quickly and effectively for any mix of legacy and new technologies and our links with selected partners provide specialized support for unique areas that might need to be addressed. 

The wide reach of our athene® software enables all relevant capacity data to be centralized for analysis, reporting and planning. 

Implementing our approach offers further benefits on top of traditional capacity management as the business benefits from cost savings on software licensing and you get consistent processes across the enterprise, allowing greater staff flexibility and the ability to free staff from mundane administrative tasks giving you more time to concentrate on quality decision-making.

Done well capacity management ensures IT infrastructure supports business in achieving its goals, in a timely, consistent and cost-effective manner.

Register now and come along to one of our free educational webinars… ttp://www.metron-athene.com/training/webinars/index.html

Andrew Smith
Chief Sales & Marketing Officer

360° Capacity Management

Back in earlier times, Capacity Management was far easier.  While many of the technologies we use today (including virtualization and shared resources) started decades ago on the mainframe, all the relevant work was done on that mainframe.  The data needed to measure and manage performance and capacity was easily available, well understood, and quickly put to use.

Things are different today.  Mainframes and dumb terminals have given way to distributed, client-server environments.  Those environments have grown in complexity as technologies that allow for clustering and virtualization bring us back closer to the mainframe model of decades before.

So, given that no one data set from the resources that make up today’s data center contains everything that a capacity manager needs in order to make informed decisions, a different approach is required. 

Angle over distance

A key approach used in many fields is “angle over distance.” In other words, it’s more important to have the right approach (or the right angle) over getting as close as possible to the item (or for the capacity manager, the components) that you are analyzing.

It’s easy to look at an individual server, for instance.  Good performance and capacity data is available from most operating systems, databases, and server-based applications.  What happens, though, when a transaction spans the Internet along with dozens of servers (web servers, middleware servers, application servers, indexing servers, etc.) and potentially a group of databases or a big data warehouse?  It’s possible that service level agreements are not being met even though each component piece appears to working as designed.  This is where “angle over distance” and 360° Capacity Management is crucial to the success of a service, to IT, and to the business.

From one angle, managing components (and the services that run on them)

It’s still crucial that all the hardware components be monitored and managed as one under-configured (or mismanaged) component could cause considerable performance and capacity problems.  A product like our athene® is an important tool in the kit as it can capture performance and capacity data from all the hardware resources that make up today’s complex infrastructure.  Data can be captured and incorporated into a Capacity Management Information Store (CMIS) by using athene® Acquires or using agentless technology.  Vital data such as business statistics, centralized storage and network data can be stored in the CMIS by using our Integrator Capture Packs to ensure visibility of data from all angles.  Capture Packs are available from Metron for many storage, framework, middleware and network environments.  Metron also supports a variety of capture packs integrating data from our software partners such as Intellimagic, AES and IIM.  Others are continually being added as part of Metron’s client relationships or developed by the athene® user community.  Whatever software you choose to use, you ned something that can provide this central CMIS capability and the component feeds into it.

Covering all the angles, managing services (and the transactions that comprise them)

Once the components are well-managed, it’s time to pay close attention to the transactions.  Most service level agreements are written to ensure that a certain percentage of transactions complete within prescribed limits.  In order to police those agreements, it’s necessary to capture key metrics from every production transaction.  We feel the Sharepath software re-sold by Metron is just the tool to do this, as it measures the end-to-end experience for every transaction and can alert the analyst on transactions that are not meeting (or are in danger of not meeting) those requirements.

With Sharepath it’s possible to do much more than just measure, report, and alarm on end-to-end response times – it’s also capable of measuring the residence time for each hop in the path of the transaction.  If transactions are performing poorly, it’s possible to see exactly where it’s doing so – this is a crucial piece of information and a necessary input to the Incident Management and Problem Management processes.  There are other product solutions in this area, but we know of none that do it as comprehensively and with such a good interface as Sharepath.

360⁰ Capacity Management – See your world from all angles

Agent, agentless, framework, Capture Pack – whatever the source, all capacity data needs to be stored in the CMIS. You then need a reporting solution, in our case our athene® software, to report, analyze, trend, and predict using that data to answer key capacity management questions.  Capacity Management today has the same goals and desired outcomes as it did decades ago – providing adequate capacity at controlled costs, both now and in the future.  The methods we use today and the tools needed for meeting these goals have changed due to the changing nature of IT services and the complexity of the IT infrastructure needed to run these services.

Looking at performance and capacity challenges from all possible angles, 360°Capacity Management, gives you the ability to properly meet service level agreements and meet capacity management’s mission of providing adequate capacity at a controlled cost, both now and in the future.

If you'd like to learn more about 360° Capacity Management then register for our free webinar on September 13 http://www.metron-athene.com/training/webinars/webinar_summaries.html

Andrew Smith

Chief Sales & Marketing Officer