Capacity planning for applications


Johannesburg, 19 Feb 2019

Traditionally, capacity planning has always focused on the infrastructure tier. This tier focuses on the IT components like virtual or physical servers, network devices, and components that those use, like CPU, memory, disk storage, etc.

The metrics are component-oriented, like percentage of CPU or memory used, and total amount of CPU power or memory space, and although there has always been the desire to expand this into the application and end-user space, the tools and access to the actual data has always been limited.

The service tier or application layer is about describing and having metrics for the services the organisation builds and uses or sells. At this level, the metrics are what make sense to the users; they are used to measure the quality of the service. For a Web application, for instance, we are talking about metrics like number of concurrent users that can be served, what latency a user experiences for completing a service request, what is my response time or how many service requests can be completed in one hour.

Introducing application capacity planning

ITRS Insight Capacity Planner is the only SaaS product on the market that complements your application performance monitoring (APM) investment by providing predictive and prescriptive analytics to quantify the impact of business or infrastructure change on your application performance, helping you to ensure customer experience is maintained at the level that business expects.

Report: Regain control by reporting on application resource allocation, usage and cost on a per line of business, business service, application or tier basis.

Recommend: Improve service, manage costs and reduce waste by identifying areas where resource allocation and usage are imbalanced. Identify bottlenecks in application tiers and address potential performance issues before they occur. Allocate more capacity where historical usage shows it is lacking, or reclaim resources from areas where they are not needed.

Predict: Become more proactive in your management, avoiding potential problems before they affect business. Detect increasing trends in resource consumption, response times and volumes, and alert users when usage is predicted to reach certain levels in the future.

Plan: Create predictive models of future headroom and future performance based on the evidence of previous transactions. Our models are trained on your data and surfaced through our visualisations, allowing you to work with the results, share the insights and make decisions based on quantifiable evidence.

Operations teams spend too much time reacting and not enough time planning ahead. ITRS Insights Capacity Planner gives complete visibility of your applications and infrastructure. Using powerful predictive analytics, the software automatically identifies bottlenecks in your applications. ITRS Insights Capacity Planner has avoided hundreds of critical system outages and saved businesses billions of dollars in wasted capacity.

Figure 1: Application Capacity Planning.
Figure 1: Application Capacity Planning.

Application performance monitoring (APM) integrations

ITRS Capacity Planner can provide end-to-end insights via integration with our own leading Geneos solution, AppDynamics, Dynatrace or New Relic.

Figure 2: The image above depicts a Geneos APM solution but this could easily be data from any APM solution.
Figure 2: The image above depicts a Geneos APM solution but this could easily be data from any APM solution.

Capacity planning handled by the experts

Our Managed Services team takes full responsibility to ensure your capacity planning deployments are maintained and perform according to your exact needs. The Managed Service team also takes responsibility for licensing and upgrading any software necessary to safeguard system stability. It also provides governance to increase reliability of your environments and so you can trust the output produced.

Conclusion

Insights Capacity Planner is a leading offering providing capacity planning as a service:

* Delivers a SaaS solution with rapid time to value and quick return on investment.
* Utilises a big data approach by ingesting large-scale data volume and variety from existing monitoring tools.
* Harnesses a powerful predictive analytics engine to forecast capacity usage and predict constraints.
* Offers best-in-class scenario modelling to plan key IT projects, including data centre rationalisations, P2V transformations and cloud migrations.
* Correlates application and infrastructure data to let business demand drive infrastructure decision-making.

For a simplified view of the capabilities of ITRS Insights Capacity Planner, watch the video below:

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MentPro

MentPro is a leader in strategic IT service management disciplines like availability and capacity management, and has extensive experience applying and implementing industry standards and frameworks like COBIT 5, ITIL v3 2011 and ISO/IEC 20000 in both the private and public sector.

Alan Foley is a certified COBIT 5 implementation professional and works with customers to improve and mature their availability and capacity management processes. He can be found on LinkedIn or on e-mail alan.foley@mentpro.co.za. For more information on availability and capacity services offered, please visit MentPro.com.

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