Capacity Planning

Easily predict future values based on historical performance

It's good to detect and solve problems, but it's better to avoid them. Unless you have unlimited resources, capacity planning is key to keeping your systems healthy and your customers happy. Effective capacity planning reduces outages, and minimizes their impact on the business. With HQ, you can manage to the varying service level requirements that drive capacity requirements: you have visibility into current service levels and resource utilization, and can project future requirements. HQ gives you the intelligence to build out your infrastructure proactively instead of reactively, to understand where the need is greatest, and to make tradeoffs informed by the real costs and benefits.

What are your service level requirements? You need to know, because they drive your capacity requirements. There's no one answer, because service level requirements vary across the infrastructure. No IT shop has a single customer or service level requirement: regardless of your business or application mix, your IT service is naturally segmented by performance and availability requirements. It hurts more when shopping cart applications fail than when account aging processes do. HQ's group and application features allow you to manage resources in terms of the level of service you have to provide. You can slice and dice your software and network services in whatever ways make sense. You can monitor internal apps separately from those that serve customers, break IT resources down in terms of a line of business/product line/product hierarchy, or map them to contractual service level agreements.

Do you have the capacity to meet your service level requirements? Whether your answer is "yes" or "no", are you sure? Can you prove it? HQ can help you determine if you are meeting your requirements and how much, if any, head-room you have to meet increased demand. You can measure and report utilization of core resources—CPU , memory, I/O devices, and bandwidth—across the board and by group or application. You can identify the most highly utilized resources, and then look for the biggest hog at the trough.

What do you need to maintain current service levels over the next 6 months, or a year? HQ gives you the information and tools to know. You can evaluate current service levels and utilization in terms of HQ-calculated historical baselines that reflect what's "normal", or baselines you define explicitly. HQ's extrapolation tools help you predict future service levels and resource utilization, deploy your existing resources more effectively, and plan and justify resource acquisition plans.