Capacity Planning or Capacity Management is a major issue for IT departments that manage services.
The objective of Capacity Management is to ensure that IT resources are available at the right time, at the best cost and in sufficient quantity to provide the quality of service required by users.
The three types of Capacity Management
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) divides capacity management into three sub-processes:
- Capacity Management Resources (RCM);
- Capacity Management Services (SCM);
- Capacity Management Business (BCM).
The Resource Capacity Management consists in monitoring the evolution of the resources utilization rate (processor load, disk space occupancy rate, RAM occupancy rate, input and output level, etc.) in order to anticipate infrastructure adjustments before being confronted with service level degradations or costly overcapacities. The Service Capacity Management measures the level of performance of the service (typically the response time). The Business Capacity Management focuses on future user needs and the ability to meet them.
ServiceNav for Resource Capacity Management (RCM)
ServiceNav provides a capacity report by service category: the Capacity Analysis Report.
The objective of this report is to identify, over a given period of time, the devices that consume the most (overload) or the least (under-utilization) resources. These resources are defined by a service category (Processor, RAM, Disk, Network traffic).
With this report, it is for example possible to know all my devices whose disk capacity is >70% or <30%, or all those that used more than 60% of CPU between 01/01/2018 and 31/01/2018, etc.
It is also possible to display in this report a TOP X of the overloaded or underused equipment on a particular category.