Capacity Management

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Goal – Primary Objective
• To understand:

- The future business requirements (the required

service delivery)
- The organisation’s operation (the current delivery)
- The IT infrastructure (the means of service delivery)

• Ensure that all current and future capacity and

aspects of the business requirements are provided
cost effectively

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Why Capacity Management
• Monitor the performance and throughput of IT
services
• Tuning activities to make efficient use of resources
• Understand the current demands for IT services and
produce forecasts for future requirements
• Help to influence demands for IT resources
• Production of a Capacity Plan predicting the IT
resources needed to achieve agreed or proposed
service levels

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Success Factors
• Accurate business forecasts
• Understanding of current and future technology
• Ability to demonstrate cost effectiveness
• Interaction with other Service Management processes
• Ability to plan for and implement appropriate IT
capacity to match business requirements and
predictions

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Responsibilities of Capacity
Management
• Business Capacity management (BCM)
- Ensuring future business requirements for IT services
are considered and matched to capability
• Service Capacity Management (SCM)
- Managing performance of IT services delivered to
customers and documented in SLAs
• Resource Capacity management (RCM)
- Management of components ensuring that all
resources are monitored & measured

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Business Capacity Management

Planning Future Business requirements

Requires a knowledge of…..
• Existing Service Levels, SLA’s
• Future service levels ans SLR’s
• Business Plan and Capacity Plan
• Modelling Techniques
Analytical
Simulation
Trending
Baselining
• Application Sizing 6
Service Capacity Management

Monitors and Measures services

Requires a knowledge of …..
• Service Levels and SLA’s
• Service throughput and performance
• Tuning and demand management

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Resource Capacity Management

Management of Components of IT Infrastructure

Requires a knowledge of …..
• Current technology and utilisation
• Future alternative technologies
• Resilience of systems and services

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Capacity Management
Database (CDB)
• Forms the basis for the production of all Capacity
management reporting
• May consist of many physical data stores covering:
- Business data
- Service data
- Technical data
- Financial data
- Utilisation data
• May form part of the CMDB

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Iterative Activities – The Cycle
Tune

Implement Analyse

Monitor

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 Iterative Activities – Inputs
Iterative Activities
Tune

Implement Analyse

Monitor

SLM
Resource
Thresholds
Utilisation
Thresholds
Capacity
Management
DB

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 Iterative Activities – Outputs
Iterative Activities
Tune

Implement Analyse

Monitor

Resource
Utilisation
SLM Exception
Capacity Exception Reports
Management Reports
DB

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Other Activities
• Demand Management – Differential Charging and Lock out
• Modelling
- Trend Analysis,
- Analytical Modelling
- Simulation Modelling
- Baseline Modelling
• Application Sizing
• Production of the Capacity Plan

Capacity planning is essentially a balancing act:

• Cost against Capacity
• Supply against Demand
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Benefits of Capacity
Management
• Increased efficiently and cost savings resulting in
more economic provision of IT services
• Elimination of unnecessary spare capacity
• Elimination of panic buying
• Possibility for deferred expenditure
• Reduced risk of performance Problems and failures
• More confident and improved forecasting
• Improved awareness of capacity issues within the
development cycle

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CM

Exam Tips
• Business Capacity Management - future business requirements
• Service Capacity Management – current service delivery
• Resource Capacity Management – underlying resource
components

• Demand Management – Differential Charging

– Modelling
• Tuning
• Analytical
• Simulation
• Baseline (what if?)
• Application sizing
• There are capacity threshold that generate alerts!
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Exam Questions
• Application Sizing is a technique used by Capacity
Management. Why is Application Sizing Important?

A The availability of an IT service can be measured (AM)

B The use of an IT application can be controlled
C The maintenance of technical skills is important to
application developers
D The resources needed (RCM) for an application and
its performance can be predicted (BCM)

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Exam Questions
• Differential Charging is a technique used in ………..

A FTA (Fault Tree Analysis – ITSCM)

B Status Accounting (Configuration Management)
C Demand Management (Capacity Management –
Varying Tariffs)
D CRAMM (ITSCM – Risk Analysis)

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