Build ITIL Success with Capacity Management

The commercial world is embracing IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) in a big way. According to Forrester Research, 40 percent of billion dollar corporations have now adopted ITIL, and that figure will rise to 80 percent within two years. Similarly, ITIL is catching fire in government circles. In fact, government is probably better positioned for ITIL than most private sector organizations as roles, responsibilities and hand-offs are usually better defined.

Why soaring adoption rates
As well as greater efficiency, IT consulting firm Gartner states that an organization can achieve up to a 48 percent reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by fully implementing ITIL. These numbers are backed up by anecdotal evidence.

Rather than being a standard, ITIL offers a framework of best practices and guidelines. Organizations don't become "ITIL Certified." What ITIL provides though, is a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provisioning.

While ITIL encompasses such areas as Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, Configuration Management, Change Management, Release Management, Service Level Management (SLM), Financial Management, Continuity Management and Availability Management, the area which tends to open the door to wider ITIL success is Capacity Management.

While Capacity Management can be viewed on its own, it exerts an influence on many other ITIL processes. For instance, it can transform SLM from a reactive process into a proactive process.

Capacity Management is all about understanding how the infrastructure is being used and how it will be used. It enables organizations to see the best way to optimize the performance of the current infrastructure. It also permits IT to predict accurately how much added capacity must be built for new services, as well as how it might be possible to avoid such build out if the budget is tight.

Delve into Capacity Management
To understand the full extent of Capacity Management, let's divide Capacity Management into three areas.

Business Capacity Management helps us understand future business requirements, and their impact on Service Level Agreements (SLA) and infrastructure resources. It focuses on business plans, competitive intelligence and business forecasts.

Service Capacity Management looks at applications and the business processes they support from an enterprise perspective. It is all about understanding resource consumption patterns to ensure services can meet SLAs. Service Capacity Management deals with services, not infrastructure or components. Therefore, it concentrates on workload analysis, demand management, statistical trends and what-if scenarios.

TeamQuest Capacity Management software, for example, assists here by transforming utilization metrics into service levels and workloads. Thus it is possible to understand the reasons behind traffic/utilization peaks.

Resource Capacity Management looks at resources from an individual infrastructure component perspective and then builds and maintains the infrastructure capacity plan.

It encompasses historical and real-time analysis, day-to-day monitoring, detecting bottlenecks, correlation analysis and drill down. A capacity manager, therefore, can use this function to set upper and lower alarms limits on graphs. If a metric such as CPU utilization moves beyond these limits, alarms are sent.

There are situations where organic growth does not take place - a merger is one example - and modeling may be the best Capacity Management approach. Modeling begins with gathering raw empirical data and calibrating it. In the simplest terms, modeling is about finding the point where a server starts to slow down.

Simplifying Capacity Management
The subject of capacity management can easily become complicated by virtue of the formulas and algorithms employed. However it's an art that answers fundamental questions such as:

• Will a server last till September?
• If not, what is needed and by when?
• How much will new hardware really cost?
• Are we sure we really need it?

This could perhaps be boiled down to, "Capacity management planning deals with what we have, what we are doing with it and what we need?" It results in a plan that is then presented to management. Such a capacity plan must be communicated clearly, concisely, and in an understandable vocabulary. It requires a simple, to the point statement of what is needed exactly and by when.

Capacity Management's influence
Capacity Management complements most areas of ITIL. Take the case of Problem Management. This is about ensuring that problems are identified and resolved. In addition, it includes the prevention of problem occurrence and recurrence, and the reduction of the overall number of incidents.

Capacity Management tools help by providing drilldown capabilities that help isolate root causes. A peak of traffic, for example, might be tracked to backup software running, or to a more serious issue. Correlation analysis tools found in some Capacity Management software packages such as TeamQuest enable organizations to find the underlying reason for a problem. Since historical data is retained with regard to process table, historical data can be accessed and analyzed during any investigation. Correlation analysis gives a valuable way to locate the source of a problem.

Availability Management is another area of ITIL that can be materially assisted by capacity management tools. Availability Management enables the delivery of a cost effective and sustained level of availability throughout the enterprise. This part of ITL is of value when it comes to designing IT services for high availability. It also helps in monitoring key areas, and in balancing availability and cost.

With monitoring, for example, Capacity Management tools can be used to render an alarm or notification about an outage or abnormalities concerning a service. This could be accomplished by combining adequate workload definitions and alarms monitoring the number of processes/threads/activities for each workload. User agents could be implemented and used for checking the availability of a service by sending a request. In addition, user agents could be used for monitoring the uptime of a server.

Capacity Management tools can be of great benefit with Continuity Management particularly when it comes to the creation of disaster recovery plans. Continuity Management is about ensuring business survival by reducing the impact of a disaster or major failure. It is designed to prevent the loss of customer and user confidence, as well as the production of IT recovery plans. Capacity Management is useful in evaluating different backup and recovery scenarios. It makes it possible to analytically model various architectures to assess cost, risks and recovery times.

Financial Management is another important process within ITIL that Capacity Management complements. Financial Management provides cost-effective stewardship of the IT assets and the financial resources used in providing IT services. This includes budgeting, accounting and charging.

In IT chargeback, for example, it is necessary to obtain a fair allocation of costs among the various departments utilizing IT services. In this area, Capacity Management offers workload characterization in combination with process accounting. This provides the basis for how to divide the costs of the infrastructure between departments, projects and customers. The distribution of costs could be based on any component (or combinations thereof): CPU, memory, I/O activity, etc.

Capacity Management tools like TeamQuest Model can also be used to improve the budgeting process by predicting future investments - opening the door to guaranteeing an accurate split of costs in chargeback.

Finally, SLM is the part of ITIL that deals with maintaining and gradually improving business-aligned IT service quality. It sets agreed-upon levels of service between provider and receiver, and verifies these are being attained. Thus SLM is a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring, reporting and reviewing IT service achievements.

Capacity Management plays a pivotal role in the tracking of SLAs. TeamQuest agents can monitor the many aspects of an SLA, for example, such as response time, availability and service hours. These agents trigger alarms when service-level metrics pass certain pre-set thresholds. This is an essential ingredient in any ITIL-based organization that is serious about guaranteeing certain levels of service.

TeamQuest Performance Software offers a powerful suite of tools to help forge success with ITIL endeavors. Contact a TeamQuest representative today and request an online demo today.