why is capacity management important

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. With proper capacity management, businesses can keep an eye on how much they can achieve, produce, or sell within a particular period. 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. You'll need to know how many CPU, memory and storage resources each workload requires -- these are your baseline capacity requirements. Are there IT jobs in cloud capacity management? Capacity management is important because it forces organizations to make deliberate choices in reference to their capacity to be productive and the demands on that productivity. Arrange the right people and tools. Chances are that your team is working on multiple projects at once. If there is not enough capacity to meet demand, this can lead to lost sales and opportunities. Many businesses run a fine line between profit and loss. Capacity management tools measure the volumes, speeds, latencies and efficiency of the movement of data as it is processed by an organization's applications. Specifically, the people who are available to perform productive work. Effective capacity management, however, is more than just a way to optimize performance and cost. But when it comes to automated operations, real time means essentially as fast as you can, and too slow is too late; fail. By noting which particular resources are being stressed, current configurations can be appropriately revised and IT planners can assemble purchasing plans for hardware and software that will help meet future demands. As opposed to a match strategy, where work put into constantly calculating the current and near-future demand, an adjustment strategy responds to indicators on a less-frequent basis. Copyright 2010 - 2023, TechTarget Also, note the level of context-dependent nuance you may see in the numbers. Attrition is the gradual but deliberate reduction in staff as employees retire or resign and are not replaced. Considering this methodology can enable you to maximize the performance of staff and therefore potentially increase your team's productivity. As mentioned, better scheduling is one way to achieve this. The ability to pay as you go is great when you dont use very much, not so great when consumption starts to grow. Production capacity management most often refers to an organization's ability to produce a specific good. Syncsort Capacity Management is not your grandfathers capacity management. What do VMware All Rights Reserved, That maxim applies whether we're talking about new hires or seasoned veterans; even if the amount of time needed for each greatly differs, it's still non-zero! Short-term forecasting can be used to plan for things like staffing levels during busy periods. This is also about making use of any underutilized resources in the system. 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. 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. There are several different capacity management strategies that can be used, depending on the needs of the organization and its tolerance for specific types of risk. Make sure you understand why capacity management is important and consider using some of the above tools and techniques to manage capacity as best as possible. This means making sure that there is extra capacity available to meet unexpected demand. This is another common cause of "crunch" and other forms of overburdening employees just to spin the meager resources they've been given into gold. 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. Serverless functions allow you to allocate large amounts of resources for short periods in a more cost-effective and easy-to-manage way than is possible with virtual servers. They will only increase the number of staff available when a specific demand requires them to do so. The organization may take a lag strategy approach for certain time frames or projects and a lead strategy in others. Generally, these management systems focus on network performance and can provide comprehensive information on most aspects of data movement. 3. The important thing about capacity planning is that infrastructure is flexible to meet changing demands. Although capacity management for networks doesn't directly address security, it can be a good method of keeping track of network access, which can help inform security procedures. Decisions made in light of these considerations will reflect the priorities of the organization, including its tolerance for various risks. Take a second look if you dont use these disciplines to manage your environments yet. An adjustment strategy could be thought of as the most-balanced approach to capacity management, but it also does forego the strongest advantages of the strategies above. 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. Many projects also need time spent for leadership or the team as a whole to come together, define scope, go through requirements, get approval, and ultimately start work on the very first project tasks. Privacy Policy There are three main components to capacity management: 1. The organization can take any of the above strategies for managing capacity in response, based on their strategic goals. What is capacity management, and why is it important? But in todays online-always world, provisioning of new virtual resources is often just-in-time to allow services to scale to demand. Large scale projects can (and frequently do) require cross-functional teams in order to properly engage in resource capacity management. 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. 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. Data storage management helps organizations understand where they have data, which is a major piece of compliance. Do the baseline workload requirements and the anticipated scalability needs that you identified for each workload remain consistent with actual performance. Such companies might do better to stick with on-premises architectures. For example, capacity management can help determine which workloads to move to the cloud. On the other hand, if there is too much capacity, this can lead to wasted resources and higher costs. How often do your autoscaling policies trigger? A learning curve is a mathematical concept that graphically depicts how a process is improved over time due to learning and increased proficiency. 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. They will also likely have consumable components like grease, ball bearings, labels, etc. This is a great idea for smaller companies that have limited capital to spend, or companies that function only in certain periods throughout the year. (+ important capacity terms) Capacity management is the process of ensuring that companies maximize their production output. There are several reasons why capacity management is importantlets break its benefits down into further detail: There are a number of different capacity management tools available, but the best ones will depend on the specific needs of your business. Another aspect of capacity management is to determine how many servers to include in a cluster that shares responsibility for hosting an application. Key to your success is to know the capacity of these interconnected pieces to sustain transaction growth. Or 100 machines would take 100 hours to meet the capacity demands. If they can't, they miss one of the chief advantages of cloud architecture. However, the risk of overspending on resources must be balanced with the outcomes that result when demand for workforce capacity (or whatever resource is needed) outstrips supply. Plan to allocate 20% more resources to each workload than the baseline requirements dictate. As stated at the top of this blog, capacity management includes planning activities, management activities, and optimization. Use hard data from your own teams' time logs to more-accurately calculate your current resource capacity. Simply put, businesses have a certain number of available hours from resources and the goal here is to maximize the value gained within the given limits. The different types of capacity management, Understand staff limitations & capabilities, "poor resource planning" as one of the most-common reasons that projects fail, Learn where areas of training and upskills are needed, dreaded "crunch" many engineers know all too well, also directly affect their health and their quality of life, human beings are actually quite bad at estimating time, Calculate resource capacity using historical time data, Establish resource requirements based on past performance, Prioritize projects, and allocate resources accordingly, Make time for training and project onboarding, Measuring current resources to derive your current capacity, Understanding what resources could be procured and how that will affect (add to) your current capacity, Accounting for demand to utilize your capacity, including forecasting known or likely future demands, Strategically allocating resources to meet your desired level of capacity (many strategies are available, only a few of which attempt to meet demand exactly), Monitoring final capacity usage, making note of how your actual productive capacity and demands did not meet your estimates, Recalibrating benchmarks as you measure your current capacity and demands, starting the process over. Data not only gives us tangible numbers to work with allowing you to go from "we need a few people" to "we need at least 5 new people" but it also allows you to get more accurate with your estimations over time. 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. 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. Or, spikes in demand for the product could create support issues that require more staff to be hired in order to address the issue. Employees may also suffer from burnout if they are being asked to carry the load while the organization prepares to scale up resources and hire more workers. Resource management is the practice of planning, scheduling, and allocating people, money, and technology to a project or program. The most important thing about capacity management is that it is used for budgeting and planning purposes throughout the IT service management. A match strategy for capacity management seeks to constantly adjust the amount of available resources in order to accurately reflect current and near-future demands. External networking should also be monitored. Consider using scheduling apps like Humanity, WorkTime and Calendly to ensure your employees are as efficient as possible. This can be achieved through process improvements, better utilization of technology, and better scheduling. An overtaxed processor would be a candidate for upgrading. Wrong-sized workloads can create problems for the people who expect a specific application to be ready for them when they need it. 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." 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. Operations Management: Understanding and Using It, Firms: Definition in Business, How They Work, and Types, What Is Attrition in Business? Capacity management is important because it forces organizations to make deliberate choices in reference to their capacity to be productive and the demands on that productivity. A lagging capacity management strategy involves reacting to demands as they reveal themselves. One of the key metrics that IOmeter provides is IOPS -- input/output operations per second -- which is a basic measure of the transfer rate of data during processing. 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. 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. It is the smallest of margins that can lead to a business making a large profit, or ending up with a significant loss. Measurement and analysis tools must be able to observe the individual performances of IT assets, as well as how these assets interact. They should also set contingency plans for cases when the number of people (or, more generally, the available supply of resources) cannot keep up with project demands or if there are too many people (or an oversupply of resources) compared to the current levels of demand. 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