Capacity Management is not a term that you hear much anymore, but it is one that needs to be present within your organization. Of the five major areas of focus in ITIL Service Management, the last two (Operations and Continuous Improvement) are directly related to Capacity Management. Yet, if you were to look at most IT organizations, you will see the major focus is on the first three areas of the framework. Why is that? Simple, that is where the highly visible money is being spent. What about after the solution is implemented? Most organizations might just use a monitor, and it will not address the needs related to post implementation business processing (Operations and Continuous Improvement).
For Operations and Continuous Improvement, there are six Key Performance Areas (KPAs): Budget, Life Cycle, Business Activities, Functional Processing, Operational Processing, and Continuity.
RG Solutions® addresses the needs of all six KPAs for post installation business processing. It allows you to put Capacity Management back into the IT vocabulary without high cost, expert talent, or full time staffing. You get processes, procedures, and information that enables even the most junior person to effectively communicate capacity issues to business management.
Key Business Values
- Measures IT for the Business. Contains the traditional information required for Capacity Management, but also includes the related business costs of the processing.
- Automatically calculates the “Green Costs” of the system based on local power rates. Cost amounts include related infrastructure costs (i.e. cooling, etc.) for the system.
- Cost and performance information for Usage, Demand, and Life Cycle evaluation.
- Layered information that includes detailed native as well as derived (from the native) data that is common to any type of system or platform.
- Complete processing in one product to archive, analyze, and report on virtually any Capacity Management concern.
A Different Approach
First and foremost, RG Solutions® determines, captures, and stores what is critical for Capacity Management. There are three areas of concern for any system: doing the work (cpu, memory, etc.), feeding the work (disk, san, etc.), and the results of the work (response times to users). RG Solutions® knows what type of information is needed to measure these critical areas. The information collected is based on ten minute intervals, 24/7, for each system within the scope of reporting. The collection process has been designed to be of very little impact to the host system.
It is not hard to comprehend how much data can be collected on a daily basis for just one system. When you add in Virtual Appliances, SOA architectures, and other modern configurations, you can easily see why Capacity Management went out of vogue many years ago. With the old methods of manually analyzing trends, looking at data and charts, building models, it is no wonder that it has fallen out of use. It would be hard enough to justify for just one system let alone many.
RG Solutions® takes a different approach to Capacity Management. Rather than a tool that provides information to an expert, RG Solutions® is an expert that provides information. It is like having an expert consultant on your staff to gather all the capacity information, analyze it, and then report it to you and your management. The creators of RG Solutions® recognize that the practices of Capacity Management are still valid; it was the advancement of open systems that made them impractical. So rather than be just a tool, RG Solutions® has become an expert.
Concise and Precise
RG Solutions® takes the approach that all systems should be routinely looked at regardless of the business priority. The key is to be able to identify those systems that need further attention. In the past, this meant that once a system issue was identified, more monitoring was required to start “zeroing” in on the problem. Often times this was an iterative process that could takes days – or even weeks. In this 24/7 environment, this type approach is not acceptable. What RG Solutions® does is to gather all the information it needs, all the time. In this way, the information that is needed is available when needed.
RG Solutions® has the ability to concisely and precisely measure any system for an interval as small as ten minutes, or as large as one month. These measures are based on the three main system concerns (Doing, Feeding, and Delivery). For the Doing, RG Solutions® provides information about the overall system processing. This information not only includes basic technical measures (i.e. processor seconds, I/Os, etc.) but also other measures that are important for Capacity Management (i.e. used capacity, metering information, etc.) and the business (i.e. cost). RG Solutions® uses a proprietary metering model for its processing that allows for measurement and comparison of dissimilar workloads and systems.
For the Feeding concern, RG Solutions® provides two types of summary data: Activity and Storage. The Activity information is related to the ability to get the information to/from the storage device. The Storage information is concerned with the used storage areas of the devices.
For the Delivery concern, RG Solutions® provides two types of data: Volume and Response Time. The Volume data provides information about the individual requests to the system. Included in the volume data is a technical breakdown for the average request. For Response Time data, RG Solutions® provides information about the different response time “buckets”. While this information is normally available on most mainframes, open systems do not have this type of information readily available. RG Solutions® provides interfaces that allow the user to provide companion data that can be integrated in its place, and will give the same results.
RG Solutions® not only allows you to view concisely and precisely, but also allows you to design reports for the delivery of virtually any type of stored information. There is no limit as to what can be delivered either manually or routinely – all with little technical expertise or time.
