Capacity Management: - A process whose primary target is to define and achieve that IT resources

are right-sized to meet the demand, in terms scaling along with business and ensuring it doesn’t
become bottle neck.

Business requirements are volatile in nature and need IT setup to be equally dynamic, there are few
sub parts of IT which can be managed well and can be scaled easily, few parts which need specific
planning and investment like resources or new upgrade of hardware.

Availability management goes hand in hand with Capacity management and is very important aspect
if any setup. However the source of data is an important aspect of Capacity management few points
for inputs: -

1. If a robust infrastructure monitoring is in place it actually helps in terms to gather data which
can give historical view point of growth or increase in utilization of infrastructure.
2. Input points from standard installation like new rollout requires addition of capacity basically
project which are running in parallel to operations will have inputs for additions.
3. Inputs from incident management data from a specific duration which can show case
increase or decrease utilization of specific nature due to business activity.
4. Capacity of resources or finance is another aspect which can be predicted or forecasted
basis previous experience.
5. Use of analytics tools which predicts increase or future requirement of infrastructure or
resources.

What Qualifies for Capacity management?

Few key points which we will cover and which should be focus points for a good ITIL based
infrastructure is mentioned below, however this could change depending or can have more aspects
which would depend on individual business or setup.

1. Hardware utilization and future growth

2. Application Utilization and future growth
3. User volume increase/seasonal requirements/new acquisition.
4. Business growth.
5. Resource supporting setup.
6. Shared platform like Databases.
7. Project planned or expected to be implemented.
What is the Goal of Capacity Management?

 Manage all capacity for Hardware, Services and Resources

 Identify all future requirements well in advance
 Work on ensuring high scalability of the environment
 Co relate financial management improvement with help of capacity management
 Integrate all ITIL processes in a robust manner for becoming input source

Key points to start with capacity management

 Gather the Data: - Identify source of data, integration points of other ITIL processes are key,
Business decision importance with IT setup and correlation ability is an important task
 Build Plan: - Identify the plan for the implementation, post source the document
implementation plan and the check points on verifying the results, importantly identify failure
and improvement metrics.
 Execute plan: - Execute the plan, and share the results with business and identify quality and
quantitative metrics to see results.
 Open for Business: - Keep all stake holders in loop and keep sharing the results and identify
the growth and expectations metrics with business.
 Review after implementation:- Review plan has to be strong and key metrics have to be
clearly defined.

What should Capacity manager primarily focus?

 Identify source of inputs and work with respective managers like incident, change or problem
manager
 Identify current capacity parameter and work on creating scalability matrix integrated with
financial management
 Ensure high SLA is delivered and reduced service down time
 Create capacity plan and get it reviewed and signed off by business.
 Focus on being integrated with business, working in isolation with other ITIL processes
manager or business will defeat the purpose.

What Are Sub Processes of Capacity manager?

1. Component Capacity Management

2. Service capacity management
3. Business capacity management
Component Capacity Management: - It is all about the sub parts or the key hardware/elements
which help keep a stable infrastructure, like Servers, Networks, WAN devices and links, Storage and
hard disks or memory.

As an IT manager or managing the Capacity management process the key would be that the
infrastructure is closely monitored, every event or incident are given importance and are tracked,
most important the documentation or registration of logs.

The event registration whether through service tool or even in simple excel files, helps the Capacity
manager to reach to some conclusion in terms of future requirements, it is not necessary that every
future requirements are done thinking high utilization or addition of hardware resources, there is an
important aspect of under utilization which means that if a server has capacity to process “X” and is
processing “X-Y” then the delta can be redirected to another server or service.

Ability to decide on immediate/surprise/future requirements is very important and we will take a small
e.g. to understand it further: -

 Your server hard disk reaches 100% usage and all hosted application on it crashes.
 the above hard disk utilization is a key point which could have been avoided if the monitoring
of the utilization and its trends were closely monitored

As a capacity manager or the leaser the first requirement is to have input points, which can help you
decide on achieving the requirements/Avoid downtime due to capacity crunch/ ad hoc purchase and
spending

Ad hoc spending to add capacity can help you keep stable infrastructure but it will have an impact on
financial management of the organization.

Service capacity management: - It is all about the services that are given by the IT function to
internal user or a service provider to their customer. It is like Email, chatting, Web Services, Storage
services, Applications or BYOD as a service.

The setup should have special tools and ability to monitor and handle the services specific setup to
ensure that SLA of the organization is not hit, imagine gmail.com impacted due to any reasons and
its financial and reputational impact.

This is not on component level it is at Service level that are designed to keep the services up

For an example: -
Your organization email services are backed by sufficient capacity for the service to run as expected,
once your service capabilities to be delivered are identified then the component are aligned in terms
how much hard disk, processors, RAM, storage etc..

If there is a failure in SLA then the service capacity management focuses on end to end SLA and is
key to identify failure reasons and improving it.

Business capacity management: - The main objective of business capacity management is to ensure
that future business requirements from the business are possible to be converted into the achievable
and deliverable services. The demand from below business example: -

Business head hires 1000 sales employees and asks for email access for them, on adhoc basis then
the business capacity management is actually the process which would have worked and helped in
achieving/deliver the solution to the organization.

Is Capacity management strategic?

This will depend on how volatile your business is, the organization which are not very scalable will
not be much in having capacity management scalability, but organizations which are very dynamic
and expects the backend support system to scale as per market demands will expect you as a
capacity manager to be scalable, the strategic importance of capacity management actually helps all
organization for optimal usage, savings, scalability, better predictions of availability, good financial
management abilities
Input/Flow Chart of Capacity management
Importance of Time duration for Capacity management

Capacity management is all about analytics skills and inputs sources, more the strong inputs and
ability to analyze, more the successful the capacity management output

Let’s take an e.g. of hard disk utilization on file server

60 20GB 30GB 45GB 60GB 75GB

Month 1 Month 2 Month 3 Month 4 Month 5 Month 6

In the above Hard Disk example one important aspect is that after first three months the utilization
grew by 10GB per month.

As a capacity manager inputs like this raises a risk and need planning in terms as an input that may
be after second quarter the requirement might further go up from average 15GB to 22+ GB per
month.

The capacity manager can identify more sources if the setup is new, the more the historical inputs
the more the better.

Business inputs, market inputs, financial inputs, OEM inputs and other factors are more of real time
inputs which need to be captured by capacity manager as an input and identify

Capacity Manager Activities

Few Key activities are

1. Understand the organization or the customer current and future IT demands for IT resources
and producing forecast requirements
2. Prepare and produce Capacity plans, Enabling and providing Quality enabled SLA report
3. Co relates any Incident associated with component performance and create rectification
plan.
4. Monitoring the setup past, current usage based on events and co relate the infrastructure
report
5. Understand financial ability of the organization and create plan for optimal usage.
6. Create optimal usage plan for the setup.
7. Correlate all ITIL processes and create proactive plan