Capacity Management Maturity, Assesssing & Improving - Setting the Landscape (2 of 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 our webinar October 11 'Capacity Management Maturity Series -Managed to Optimized'

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

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

It's all about the CMIS - Challenges (7 of 9)

As with everything there are going to be some challenges but get it right and there will be benefits too. I've outlined these below:

Challenges

Capturing from multiple data sources and across the enterprise

You’ll need to interact with the different departments and sources to explain or convince them why you need the data.

·        Siloed databases

·        3^rd party sources

Capturing data at the correct level and interpreting

Are you able to capture the data at the correct level and ensure that it includes all the necessary components that you need to report on i.e. vCenter data that encompasses all parts of the VMware infrastructure?

Successfully synchronising the data

Data will need to be synchronised, to establish consistency among data from its source to the CMIS. You need to piece together component, service and business data for the same granularity and date and time to provide a fuller more accurate picture of service usage.

·        Date/time, intervals

Relating Business, Service and component elements

Successfully piecing together component, service and business data for the individual elements that make up the service including incorporating the relationships between them using information from CMDBs, provided of course that the information within the CMDB is up-to-date.

Benefits

Overcoming the challenges of implementing a CMIS and populating with data will provide many noticeable benefits to the business outweighing these challenges.

Improved accuracy – being able to sift through the data and analyse for patterns of activity and seasonality will improve the accuracy of the reports produced and delivered to key stakeholders.

Meaningful thresholds – analysis of a typical period allows you to establish ‘normal’ behaviour for a system and set meaningful thresholds accordingly.

Enable the capacity portal –the CMIS underpins the whole capacity management process which includes the capacity portal and undertaking the valuable capacity management techniques.  Having the data available in logical single location provides centralised reporting into the portal which is accessible to authorised users across the web. 

Underpin valuable capacity management techniques

·        Modelling

·        Tuning

·        Demand Management

On Friday I'll be looking at how you can provide some chargeback but don't forget to take a look at our Resources, for some great white papers and on-demand webinars.

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

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

It's all about the CMIS - Importance of Correlation (5 of 9)

This graphic explains how we can gather the necessary information from the Component, Service and Business Capacity Management processes (Blue) and start to correlate the information together (Green) and  then feed the information back to other ITSM processes (White). 

This not only provides other processes with a valuable insight into both the performance and capacity of Services, it also can identify key business patterns of activity to help select modeling periods for Capacity Plans, feed SLM reporting, provide information for KPIs such as numbers of incidents caused by Capacity or Performance issues or outages and provide root cause analysis information for Problem.

Importance of Correlation

For Capacity Planning purposes, the importance of being able to correlate application transaction information with component usage is extremely important as this slide demonstrates.  The example here plots the number of Service Desk calls being reported through the application and its servers CPU usage.

 

Note the correlation between the rise in calls and the CPU usage.

From this we can start to look into producing models of an increase in numbers of Service Desk calls and its impact on the existing infrastructure used to attempt to identify a pain point and prevent slow performance or service failure. 

All of this can be achievable through implementing an enterprise Capacity Management tool that not only captures and stores data from all sub processes into a CMIS, but has the reporting and planning capabilities as mentioned throughout.

Please note though that you need to be careful on assuming that a simple trend on the CPU will suffice here due to the utilization laws as mentioned earlier on.

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

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

What is Capacity Management?

A fairly standard definition of Capacity Management is:
An IT process that helps ensure capacity meets current and 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 share the five levels of process maturity in the Capability Maturity Model on Monday.

Don't forget to sign up for our webinar series 'Capacity Management Maturity - Initial to Repeatable'
https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

Capacity Management Maturity, Assesssing & Improving - Setting the Landscape (2 of 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 sub processes:

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 Wednesday.

Come along to our webinar 'It's all about the CMIS, CMIS, No Trouble' and find out how a CMIS provides process governance and helps to mature the capacity process.

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

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer