You measure seamless through the Ops-Dev-Ops transitions and the same tools both detect bugs during development and alert of problems in production. Operations Management Theory: Definition and Modern Examples. Businesses need to be able to meet customer demand. To survive, it must have a clear understanding of past trends and performance, current service delivery, future business requirements, and the IT infrastructure supporting it all. The goal of capacity management is to optimize organizational performance by ensuring that the right level of resources are available, while also maximizing resource utilization and minimizing costs. To determine the available budget, the organization may look at its retained earnings or ability to borrow before committing to a specific resource allocation strategy. 3 Key Benefits of Hybrid Cloud as a Service, 4 Things You Need to Know Now About Edge Computing, How to maintain network continuity in a DR strategy, Prevent different types of network attacks with DR planning, 11:11 grows DR portfolio after Sungard buy, BackupLabs devises SaaS backup for under-protected apps, CloudCasa plans split from Catalogic as independent company, Data protection for SaaS-based apps is a work in progress, Use Cockpit for Linux remote server administration, Get familiar with who builds 5G infrastructure, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Networks and related communications devices, Storage systems and storage network devices. When your workload capacities are well managed, you minimize your risk of having applications or servers fail. For example, a company might forecast that there will be consumer demand for 4 million widgets over the next quarter. Consider using scheduling apps like Humanity, WorkTime and Calendly to ensure your employees are as efficient as possible. Managing the capacity of IT networks can be a complex process given the number of different networking elements that can be found in an enterprise environment. Importance of Capacity Management Without proper analysis and management of a company's capacity, it would be very difficult to create a sustainable business model. The PM may also look at the individual availability of each worker per day, while accounting for the fact that the work can sometimes take longer than expected. Bad things can happen when budgets don't reflect reality. Published on 18 May 2022. Workloads with fast-changing capacities are ideal candidates for the cloud, where resource allocations can be easily scaled up and down. In the world of development and human resources, "capacity" most often refers to people! The organization may take a lag strategy approach for certain time frames or projects and a lead strategy in others. If, for example, a company wants to expand its user base and grow the number of app installations it has, it might preemptively hire and train extra staff in anticipation of need. Dig into the numbers to ensure you deploy the service AWS users face a choice when deploying Kubernetes: run it themselves on EC2 or let Amazon do the heavy lifting with EKS. It can also help save money and time by identifying extraneous activities like backing up unused data or maintaining idle servers. If each machine is capable of producing 400 widgets every hour, it would take one machine 10,000 hours to provide the needed production capacity. For example, capacity management can help determine which workloads to move to the cloud. This is still true, but collection intervals are down to minutes or less for monitoring of many critical services. All plans start with a free 14-day trial. Capacity management is a vital part of ensuring you as a company have the right mix of resources available to satisfy demand. Stay on Top of Your Hours: The 3 Best Timesheet App to Use in 2023, Top 10 Jira Extensions For Improving Your Productivity, Asana Extensions: Top 10 For Improving Productivity, Monday Time Tracking: How To Track The Time Of Each Task And The Top 3 Tools, Notion Time Tracking 2023: Top Features And The Best 3 App Integrations, Wasted expenditure on unnecessary resources. Copyright 2022 Day.io Holdings Limited. For example, a new "sister" product may be released requiring a whole new team of software engineers. In many contexts, resources often refers to more than one type of resource. Capacity management tools measure the volumes, speeds, latencies and efficiency of the movement of data as it is processed by an organization's applications. At the same time, it lessens the risk that workloads will become overprovisioned in ways that waste money and add unnecessary management overhead. To sum it up in one sentence: we want to maximize the output of a business under all conditions. Why is capacity management important? In general, however, an effective cloud capacity management strategy will involve several key steps. Production capacity management most often refers to an organization's ability to produce a specific good. Privacy Policy Immutable data storage also helps achieve compliance. Chances are that your team is working on multiple projects at once. One of the cloud computing model's biggest benefits is that it supports highly flexible and dynamic resource usage. This preparation is required in most organizations, even if it's not built into capacity management. The Boy Scout motto is "always be prepared," and one of the most common phrases repeated to modern organizations is that "you can't manage what you can't measure." They can determine exactly how much capacity they have by multiplying the number of workers (or freelancers) available to perform the needed work by the number of hours each person is available to work. Arrange the right people and tools. There are also transitional costs to consider. Budgets should fully allocate for all resources required to accomplish a goal or complete a project. It may be time to reconfigure your thresholds. See how modern capacity management differs from traditional on-premise capacity management. Data can be used to prove why certain projects went well, why some went over time/budget, and why some utterly fail. Capacity management is a business practice organizations use to maximize their production methods, resource uses and strategies. Missed opportunities to capitalize on market demand. Capacity management also means calculating the proportion of spacial capacity that is actually being used over a certain time period. You may also notice time-based fluctuations in productivity, such as people being less productive on Fridays, at the beginning of the quarter, etc. As capacity planning is linked to your team's availability and skill sets, the schedule needs to consider other aspects like: Project type. Part of capacity management is understanding and respecting what each staffer is capable of. 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Resource planning: This is the process of determining what resources are needed to support future demand. Meaning, Types, and Benefits, Marginal Analysis in Business and Microeconomics, With Examples, What Is a Learning Curve? Managing IT infrastructure has become more complex in recent years and companies have augmented or replaced in-house systems with resources provided by cloud services. If they can't, they miss one of the chief advantages of cloud architecture. Launching a new team but unsure how to establish a culture of collaboration? However, certain niche categories of cloud workloads, such as IoT devices, typically can't be managed using autoscaling. While some organizations try to diligently match supply with demand perfectly, the reality is that there are pros and cons to this strategy (which we will dive into further below). Mainstream public cloud providers allow you to create so-called autoscaling policies. Determine which infrastructural and application architectures align with your needs. Cookie Preferences Disaster doesn't just come in the form of fire, flood and ransomware. Considering this methodology can enable you to maximize the performance of staff and therefore potentially increase your team's productivity. Another aspect of capacity management is to determine how many servers to include in a cluster that shares responsibility for hosting an application. The networking devices that should be monitored include network interface cards (NICs), network switches, network routers, storage network interfaces (e.g., host bus adapters), storage network switches and optical network devices. Large scale projects can (and frequently do) require cross-functional teams in order to properly engage in resource capacity management. Those who engage in a lead strategy for capacity management must, therefore, be ready to respond to instances where the acquired resources are not needed. Schedule a demo to learn more about Tempo today! Echoing the point above, look at historical data to tell you the most-accurate story of how many total hours it might take (and how much capacity is needed) to complete a project. External networking should also be monitored. Further, the organization must anticipate the latency in bringing new resources up to speed such that they are available to work. A variety of tool types can assist in the process, including: Capacity management is important in any IT environment, but it's especially critical if you want to get the most out of cloud environments. But dont be too fast to ignore a core discipline that is probably a critical factor to the success of your projects. Capacity management is the broad term describing a variety of IT monitoring, administration and planning actions that are taken to ensure that a computing infrastructure has adequate resources to handle current data processing requirements as well as the capacity to accommodate future loads. Those engaging with the capacity management process should strive to understand their goals and their budget constraints. The fact is that someone has to pay for whatever capacity is used, and that will be you. Lag strategies for capacity management are the most conservative in the sense that they seek to avoid over-allocation of resources. Using capacity management allows project managers and other resource-concerned roles to turn what normally falls to guesswork and intuition into a more scientific endeavor. In the world of IT operations and service management, capacity might refer to the capacity of servers to handle online traffic for a specific application or service. This type of calculation shows what factors must be considered when using capacity management to make data-backed decisions. By seeking to be neither conservative nor consistently proactive with resource procurement, the organization may encounter opportunity costs compared to choosing one of the strategies above. Or, spikes in demand for the product could create support issues that require more staff to be hired in order to address the issue. What Is Total Quality Management (TQM), and Why Is It Important? Take a second look if you dont use these disciplines to manage your environments yet. All Rights Reserved. The most common strategies for managing capacity include: Each is described in further detail below, along with their pros and cons. Certain teams may have a higher level of productivity per-hour, as may certain tasks. It's important to find out if you have the organizational resources necessary to assign those resources. The most important thing about capacity management is that it is used for budgeting and planning purposes throughout the IT service management. In the world of professional project management, however, capacity is more likely to refer to your ability to complete a group of tasks in order to meet project deadlines. In the reactive sense, capacity management creates a data trail and a historical record for how each project was allocated resources. And, if I have lost my mainframe and IBM i audience here, its not that different for them. For example, a company that releases a software product will have a baseline number of engineers and other staff available for work, based on their current budgetary needs. This is irrelevant in the cloud, where a service provider already has made those investments on a vast scale and offers as much infrastructure as any customer needs. An important subset of capacity planning is resource capacity planning, which is the process of deciding how to optimize . There may also be other requirements, such as training, orientation, or planning meetings before the workforce is able to engage in the project tasks in earnest. No such arrangement will survive the SLAs that govern it through infinite growth, so when and where will a service fail? Next, you need to take the outline you created in step one and use it to build a realistic working schedule for your team. This includes both short-term and long-term forecasting. COD is a capacity management technique that is becoming more and more common. You can apply autoscaling policies to most types of cloud workloads, including virtual machine instances, databases, containers and serverless functions. Foremost, constantly measuring demand can be a resource-intensive process. Servers and other devices use their installed memory to run applications and process data -- if too little memory is installed, processing will slow down. In addition to the wired and wireless Ethernet-based network infrastructure that connects servers to storage, end-user devices, networking gear, etc., comprehensive network capacity management must also consider dedicated storage networks based on Fibre Channel technologies; the FC networks are likely to be physically isolated from other data networks and will require different tools for monitoring and management. On the other hand, if there is too much capacity, this can lead to wasted resources and higher costs. staff) on hand to accomplish the stated goals, which for many companies means hiring enough personnel to make it all happen. At the same time, the organization must juggle other goals at the same time, including their tolerance for overstaffing, their budget constraints, their aversion to risks that come with not having the capacity to accommodate sudden demand spikes, and how all of these play into their long-term vision, goals, and mission. The number and type of networks being monitored is likely to vary as well. Once you identify potential skills shortages, you can decide whether you need to hire new employees, upskill current employees, or plan to work with contractors once the time comes. For example, a manufacturing company might invest in a new production line to increase capacity. In all cases, state-of-the-art IT involves capacity management as an integral part of DevOps practices. Or you might decide that the organization's long-term capacity efficiency will be improved with a decision to refactor applications to run as microservices inside containers. Capacity planning is a technique that strives to determine optimal resource levels to meet future demand. And from these lessons, organizations can improve decision-making and get better at long-term planning with their feet firmly on the ground. The cloud services require the same degree of capacity management, performance management and capacity planning as on-premises gear, so more holistic capacity management and planning tools have been introduced to adequately address these hybrid environments in the management process. Organizations that build 5G data centers may need to upgrade their infrastructure. How do your actual cloud costs, as reflected in monthly bills, compare to your anticipated costs? As with processor and memory measurements, it's important to monitor space usage in devices other than servers and end-user PCs that may have installed storage that's used for caching data. This provides a healthy buffer in case demand unexpectedly jumps but doesn't unreasonably overprovision your environment. Companies must remain nimble enough to constantly meet expectations in a cost-effective manner. The components of these systems vary, but a basic configuration will include control devices -- typically servers with specialized software -- and network TAPS, or network Test Access Points, devices that physically hook into particular elements of a network to capture information about data traffic as it occurs. These 5G providers offer products like virtual All Rights Reserved, Traditionally, long-term capacity management centered on the purchase and deployment process for new servers, storage media and other on-premises data center infrastructure. By optimizing processes and using resources successfully, businesses can achieve maximum productivity and eliminate waste. While the information is useful, it usually is limited and may only pertain to a few performance factors. The real truth is that you need capacity management tools even more when your resources are so fluid and provided on-demand. In essence, it is the process of allocating resources to achieve the greatest organizational value. An organization running an app will need to forecast demand and purchase server space as well as other resources required in order for the app to run. The DevOps spirit of openness and collaboration makes knowledge sharing a necessity. Capacity management can refer to IT processes or to production. What is capacity management? Still, to achieve that application-centric view of capacity management, virtually all elements of the IT infrastructure must be monitored and the definition of capacity must be broad enough to consider the impact an application will have on processing power, memory, storage capacity and speed for all physical and software components comprising an infrastructure. Traditionally, capacity management has been inherently based on historical data. Team capacity planning - This type is useful for groups that typically operate or work together. 3. This could involve running the system for longer hours, using more machines simultaneously, or training employees to be multi-skilled. Some of your cloud workloads will have higher scalability requirements than others. If that company downsizes by reducing the number of employees to 300, it will then be operating at 60% capacity (300 / 500 = 60%). With that data in hand, IT managers and administrators can set baselines for operations to meet a company's processing needs. Implementing capacity management may entail working overtime, outsourcing business operations, purchasing additional equipment, and leasing or selling commercial property. Combining the two, there's the lesson that every organizational project or goal should be approached deliberately, realistically, and with hard data in hand. Syncsort Capacity Management is not your grandfathers capacity management. This can be done by overstaffing, investing in excess capacity, or using part-time or contract workers. Attrition is the gradual but deliberate reduction in staff as employees retire or resign and are not replaced. With these policies in place, the cloud platform automatically increases or decreases the resource allocations assigned to your workloads based on the traffic thresholds you configure in the policies. Consequently, the company might decide to allocate its labor resources to only two floorsand cease leasing the unused floor in a proactive effort to reduce expenditures on rent, insurance, and utility costs associated with the empty space. The ability to pay as you go is great when you dont use very much, not so great when consumption starts to grow. There are three main components to capacity management: 1. Proactively, it allows PMs and other organizational leaders to engage in careful preparation. That calculation assumes that the workers can focus 100% of their efforts on the one project (which may not be realistic, more on this later). Disaster recovery and IT security teams must protect the network on several fronts to keep data safe from potential attackers. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, What is cloud management? Cloud capacity management is critical to an effective IT strategy. Take an ice-cream shop, for example. Understaffing a project to save on labor costs without compromising the project timeline can lead to extensive unpaid overtime the dreaded "crunch" many engineers know all too well. To get more detailed statistics, an admin would typically run a software utility program designed to address specific functionalities of a components. The latest and (greatest) features and releases from Tempo. Capacity management has been used for decades to optimize on-premise resources. Now, as cloud environments transform IT, it is being extended to enable holistic planning, management, and optimization of all your resources in one place and at the same time. The word "resource" in "resource capacity management" refers broadly to the total sum of resources an organization will need to meet the calculated demand level. The organization can take any of the above strategies for managing capacity in response, based on their strategic goals. Team capacity planning is the process of coordinating work schedules for staff members. Short-term forecasting can be used to plan for things like staffing levels during busy periods. Performance -- or throughput -- is a key metric in capacity management as it may point to processing bottlenecks that affect overall application processing performance. Proper capacity management ensures that the server runs on a virtual server instance with enough CPU, memory and storage resources to support the applications, but not so many resources that a significant portion goes unused. Marginal Cost: What's the Difference? Instead, long-term capacity management for the cloud should focus on how to evolve your cloud architecture over time in response to changing capacity requirements. Effective capacity management should help IT meet the dynamic requirements of the business while controlling and reducing costs. They may even seek to achieve an exact match during times when balancing resource availability with budget constraints is absolutely paramount. Plan to allocate 20% more resources to each workload than the baseline requirements dictate. These complex alignments of infrastructure and the transactions that pass through them need to be thought of as the single entity that they really are from a business and end-user perspective. This can be done by redesigning processes, investing in new technology, or adding additional resources. Capacity management is a strategy used by businesses to manage production output depending on the demand and supply conditions in the market so that resources are used optimally. Compliance best practices include documentation, automation, anonymization and use of governance tools. This is done by analyzing historical data, as well as current trends. How often does your team intervene manually to correct a capacity issue? What Does the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility Explain? As such, a company that rolls out an innovative new product with an aggressive marketing campaign must commensurately plan for a sudden spike in demand. These programs mimic application programs such as database management systems (DBMSes) to determine how a system is likely to perform under similar loads in production environments. Capacity Plan: A Capacity Plan is used for planning & managing the resources required for delivering IT . Outsourcing happens when businesses bring in outside help to increase capacity. Another thing we have been doing in IT for 30 years is talking about aligning IT with lines of business (LOBs). The management uses lead strategy as an important tool to attract customers towards its own products and away from those of rival companies, especially because of inventory shortage during high demands. Nevertheless, an adjustment strategy achieves the strengths found in being both responsive and reactive, depending on the situation, without the level of effort needed to engage with an exact match strategy. Components of capacity management Wrong-sized workloads can create problems for the people who expect a specific application to be ready for them when they need it. Capacity isn't determined in a vacuum! Capacity management could have a fairly narrow scope, providing high-level information on a variety of infrastructure components or, perhaps, providing detail metrics related to one segment of the computing environment. The whole point of capacity management is having enough resources (e.g. As stated at the top of this blog, capacity management includes planning activities, management activities, and optimization. A caf can brew800 cups of coffee per day. Use these numbers to create a range of possible productivities, and incorporate this understanding into your capacity estimates. Referring to the production capacity example, the required machines cannot operate themselves wholly on their own. Diminishing Marginal Returns vs. Returns to Scale: What's the Difference? Companies that poorly execute capacity management may experience diminished revenues due to unfulfilled orders, customer attrition, and decreased market share. There are several benefits of the Lead strategy, and this is why it is a favorite of entities. Generally, these management systems focus on network performance and can provide comprehensive information on most aspects of data movement. Sometimes, we do capacity management to plan server upgrades weeks and months ahead. What Is On The Job Training (OJT) And How Does It Impact Employee Development? Even worse, your consumption might be untracked and growing continually. Cloud users consume as many or as few resources as needed, and they have the freedom to adjust their consumption as needs fluctuate. The importance of capacity management A corporation doesn't just exist in real time. Taking our ice-cream van example once again, the owner may rent a second freezer during the summeras this is when demand is higher for his goods. All facets of data's journey through the IT infrastructure must be monitored, so capacity management must be able to examine the operations of all the hardware and software in an environment and capture critical information about data flow. This is a step beyond your team knowing how many resources to allocate to workloads. This rate can, in turn, allow you to understand your current capacity and anticipate any changes needed to meet upcoming demands. They may upgrade their machinery to boost the quantity of units being made, as this may be the limiting factor to the number of goods being produced. For instance, a website with a globally dispersed user base probably won't see as much fluctuation in usage in a full day as a website that caters to users in a specific geographic location, which likely will see most demand during that locale's daytime hours. But when it comes to automated operations, real time means essentially as fast as you can, and too slow is too late; fail. As alternatives to on-premise infrastructure, we have gone from your-mess-for-less outsourcing to the promise that you neednt even worry about compute power and storage if you use the cloud. What is the capacity of a business? This can be done by using cloud computing or by renting extra capacity from another company. It's relatively easy to determine if a server has adequate memory resources, but it's also important to monitor other devices in the environment to ensure that insufficient memory doesn't turn them into processing bottlenecks. What capacity will you need to go live with successfully in either case? Most importantly, data acts as a record to reflect on times when mistakes were made, predictions were inaccurate, or even when things went extremely well. An overtaxed processor would be a candidate for upgrading. As a result, he saves money by making capacity available only when it is needed. A firm is a business organizationsuch as a corporation, limited liability company, or partnershipthat sells goods or services to make a profit. For example, IOmeter is a free, open source utility originally developed by Intel that provides details about processing by servers, clusters of servers or individual end-user computers. Capacity management is the broad term describing a variety of IT monitoring, administration and planning actions that are taken to ensure that a computing infrastructure has adequate resources to handle current data processing requirements as well as the capacity to accommodate future loads. This often manifests in the form of layoffs and adjustments to the forecasted demand. In a nutshell, the "resources" an organization is looking at will be specific to the industry it is in, or sometimes even a specific department within an organization. Looking at the hypothetical 400 hour project, it is possible that 10 coding engineers working a 40 hour work week on the project can complete the project in one week. Do the baseline workload requirements and the anticipated scalability needs that you identified for each workload remain consistent with actual performance. Tempo Team That's what capacity management is all about. Thus capacity management must take into account several different aspects related to growth and production costs.