Effective capacity planning and management are fundamental to maintaining a robust IT infrastructure, helping teams optimize available resources to meet performance needs. In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about these invaluable processes to ensure your organization’s IT infrastructure is prepared for current and future demands.
What Is Capacity Management?
Capacity management is a broad yet pivotal process involving a wide range of IT monitoring, planning and optimization actions that aim to align an organization’s infrastructure with present utilization and future resource requirements. This often includes:
- Risk management.
- Service level management.
- Resource capacity planning.
- Storage capacity planning.
- Performance monitoring.
- Capacity forecasting.
But what exactly does “capacity” refer to here? Generally speaking, there are four different focus areas that IT departments must consider in capacity management:
Component Capacity
Component capacity management focuses on the individual computing components of IT infrastructure, such as servers. In this context, capacity management refers to ensuring these components have the available capacity to maintain system uptime and performance.
Network Capacity
Managing network capacity is complex and encompasses a variety of elements, from wired and wireless ethernet infrastructure to dedicated storage networks. It also includes monitoring external connections and managing network interfaces to optimize performance and inform security practices.
Business Capacity
Business capacity management strategically aligns IT resource planning with organizational goals to help meet future demand. This ensures that IT services remain available to support the company and its objectives, bridging the gap between IT departments and the rest of the business.
Service Capacity
Service capacity management monitors all IT services, such as email, internet access, applications, cloud computing and data protection, to ensure they too have sufficient available capacity. Basically, this handles any service related to IT operations that keeps the business running.
What Is IT Capacity Planning?
In contrast to capacity management, IT capacity planning is the process of forecasting future demand and resource requirements to ensure that the infrastructure has sufficient power, storage and capacity to name a few elements. Developing an effective capacity plan requires analyzing loads of historical data to predict growth and making adjustments to infrastructure components to minimize performance issues and outages.
Capacity Management vs. Capacity Planning
While capacity management and planning share similarities, they aren’t interchangeable terms. Capacity planning is just one element of the overall management cycle, which includes monitoring and optimization — however, it’s an essential step.
Whereas management tends to focus on continuous IT infrastructure monitoring and resource allocation, planning primarily deals with understanding capacity requirements and developing a demand forecast. In other words, it’s the step between collecting the data and using it to improve the infrastructure.
The Benefits of IT Resource Capacity Planning
We’ve talked a lot about using a strategic capacity plan to enhance an organization’s IT performance and expand its current capacity, but those aren’t the only reasons IT departments use forecasting. Aside from meeting current and future needs, IT resource capacity planning can be an effective cost-saving measure. With an accurate demand forecast, organizations know exactly what they need to improve or maintain their IT infrastructure, avoiding unnecessary investments in hardware or software. This is especially important in cloud environments where you pay for capacity, whether you’re using it or not.
Proactive capacity planning can also improve employee productivity and system reliability by preventing bottlenecks and minimizing service disruptions and downtime. In fact, organizations with a dedicated capacity planner or capacity planning tools experience a few competitive advantages, including:
- Improved user experience: An effective capacity planning strategy ensures IT service continuity and reliable performance for end users.
- Reduced energy costs: Capacity planning can minimize energy utilization to minimize costs and environmental impact.
- Risk mitigation: By identifying potential resource shortages, capacity planning helps organizations proactively address issues to prevent the risk of disruptions.
The IT Capacity Planning Process
IT capacity planning is not an isolated process. Instead, it fits within the overall management cycle and includes several key steps, from monitoring to optimization. While the specifics of capacity planning will be unique to your organization, infrastructure and resource utilization, the process typically follows the same steps:
- Monitor your IT infrastructure continuously.
- Collect performance and resource utilization data.
- Assess your infrastructure components.
- Evaluate your current capacity.
- Forecast future resource demand.
- Analyze for gaps or excess capacity.
- Identify ways to adapt to the demand.
- Communicate and collaborate on a capacity plan.
- Address capacity requirements with solutions.
- Review and continuously optimize for future capacity requirements.
Following this general process for capacity planning ensures efficient resource utilization and alignment with broader business goals.
Common Capacity Planning Strategies
Whereas traditional (non-tech-related) capacity planning often involves tactics like the lead or lag strategy, these aren’t exactly applicable in the world of IT infrastructure. Instead, an IT capacity planner might use one of these strategies to meet resource demands:
Buffer Capacity Planning
Buffer capacity planning is what it sounds like; it involves allocating enough capacity to account for potential unexpected spikes and future growth. This buffer acts as a safety net, handling temporary increases in capacity requirements and accommodating gradual business expansion.
Trend Analysis
Trend analysis for capacity planning involves examining long-term data and trends to inform decision-making. Identifying these historical patterns allows organizations to project future requirements. For example, if data needs have been consistently increasing, the company can plan to add additional storage capacity in the near future that would accommodate their needs just in time.
Time-Based
A time-based capacity planning strategy involves scaling resources based on time patterns. These can be seasonal demand variations or peak periods. A common example would be e-commerce websites, which scale resources up during the holiday season while shopping is at its peak.
Demand Forecasting
A capacity demand forecast relies on rich historical data and predictive modeling to anticipate future needs. By analyzing trends and patterns in data, organizations can make informed decisions around resource allocation and infrastructure adjustments. Through this ongoing process, they can continue to meet the expected demand.
Threshold-Based
Finally, threshold strategies are commonly used in capacity planning. This method involves setting predefined thresholds for resource utilization, such as CPU, memory or storage usage. When actual utilization approaches or exceeds these thresholds, it triggers a sequence of predefined actions, such as automatically allocating more resources to prevent performance degradation.
Best Practices for Capacity Management and Planning
Now that we understand how capacity planning and management are interlinked in a network of processes, let’s take a look at some best practices to keep your infrastructure performing optimally:
1. Stay Alert
First, remember that capacity planning and management is a continuous process. It’s important to stay agile and account for changes as they occur, rather than on a regular (but infrequent) basis. This continuous planning approach ensures your organization maintains visibility into key capabilities and available resources while allowing the business to meet demands as they arise.
2. Prevent Overprovisioning
Analyzing current workloads is an essential step, allowing organizations to gain insights into the state of their infrastructure. Moreover, it allows IT departments to spot underutilized areas with excess capacity. These workload analytics also play a pivotal role in informing decisions about resource allocation like shifting capacity to address potential bottlenecks.
3. Run Future Workload Scenarios
In addition to current capacity workloads, organizations should also make it a practice to run future hypothetical scenarios. Testing capacity demands like this is an excellent way to ensure your infrastructure meets any number of resource demand challenges. It can also help answer questions that inform future predictions.
4. Ensure Reporting Accuracy
Lastly, it’s crucial for IT capacity planners to have accurate data on their infrastructure in the first place. Without reliable monitoring data, your projects might as well be guesswork. Fortunately, there is a wide range of solutions available that help organizations improve their reporting capabilities both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
What Are the Best Tools for IT Capacity Planning?
Selecting the right IT capacity planning tool is essential for maintaining operational efficiency and preparing for future growth. These solutions usually offer features like real-time monitoring, trend analysis and reporting, but they’re not all created equal. The software solution you choose should align with your organization’s unique needs, complexity and goals.
Zenoss: Capacity Planning for Complex IT Environments
Zenoss offers an advanced IT capacity planning solution designed to address the challenges of modern IT infrastructures. With predictive insights, you can understand the utilization of your entire IT stack and anticipate future capacity requirements.
Zenoss enables proactive planning and risk mitigation actions, increasing visibility and resource utilization. To find out more about how Zenoss’s IT capacity planning tool and ZenPacks can help your business, schedule a demo today.
