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Posts Tagged ‘capacity management’

Know When It’s Time to Upgrade your Server Monitoring Software

Tuesday, May 14th, 2013

As enterprises continue to expand their datacenters and computing networks, IT departments are faced with the task of managing these systems and their capacity demands. Unified server monitoring has become necessary for monitoring these ever-growing servers and datacenters and achieving greater transparency in the monitoring and reporting of system events.

However, a goldilocks-like dilemma evolves when the solution is either too big (ITSM) or too small (point tool solutions) to appropriately meet the IT department’s server monitoring and capacity management needs. In this blog, we will identify the most common pitfalls of IT systems management solutions and show you how you can find a server monitoring solution that’s just right.

  1. Monitoring the Wrong Data Do you use “agentless” or SNMP server monitoring? If so, you may be monitoring the wrong data. On the other hand, ITSM suites sometimes generate so much data that it is difficult to sort through and pinpoint important data points.

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  2. No Clear View of the Data Do you find that, more often than not, you’re alerted of problems by end users before they’re identified by your server monitoring software? Does your root-cause analysis often fail to turn up the underlying causes of problems? If your answer to either of these questions is “yes,” you need a server monitoring solution that provides a transparent and high level view of all of your systems, making it easier for you to pinpoint underperformance for more proactive troubleshooting.

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  3. Manual Server Monitoring Do you spend a significant amount of time each workweek engaging in manual scripting and server monitoring tasks? Do you manually monitor server backup systems or does your server monitoring program notify you when they are in use? If you are engaging in manual server monitoring, it’s time to enter the age of integrated server monitoring.

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  4. Complexity and Hidden Costs Is the “shelf ware” piling up at your IT department? Was your ITSM framework difficult to deploy? Have you spent more money on consulting for your ITSM than the original cost of the framework itself? If your ITSM framework is large, clunky and complicated, you may not be getting your money’s worth.

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  5. Frankenstein Tools On the other side of the spectrum, IT departments that don’t want to invest in expensive ITSM frameworks may attempt to meet their server monitoring needs by cobbling together a collection of freeware and point end tools. These lower end tools often require labor intensive custom scripting and rebuilding. It is also difficult if not impossible to integrate these tools into high level dashboards, making server monitoring a manual and time consuming task.

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If the problems that we’ve outlined in this blog post are problems that your IT department regularly encounters, it may be time to invest in new server monitoring software. In the age of mushrooming servers and cloud computing, it is imperative that you look for a fully unified server monitoring solution with a single dashboard view that unifies IT monitoring and capacity management into a single, unified package. To learn more about what you can do to streamline your server monitoring efforts, download white paper The 12 Pitfalls of IT Systems Management.

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How to Empower IT Productivity + Optimize Cost-Efficiency

Friday, March 1st, 2013

We recently posted about “Tips on how to choose an IT Systems Management solution that fits your budget“. While that post went into detail about the hidden costs you should be aware of, this post will take you on an overview of how to deliver consistent IT services at the lowest possible cost.

Productivity

First, let’s discuss productivity. In a Forrester poll of IT Executives on how to increase productivity, 64% pointed to end-to-end infrastructure monitoring to increase productivity. In this case, researchers agree that having a unified monitoring dashboard can help create a more highly productive and proactive team; catching outages and solving problems before they happen. Being proactive also lowers Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR), which is a critical KPI to measure IT productivity.

The same Forrester report goes on to explain that 55% of IT executives state that proper capacity management and planning is key to meet business demand. In other words, having total capacity visibility across the entire data center is essential to making smart business decisions. This includes total capacity visibility and reporting across physical, virtual, legacy and even cloud resources. Without visibility across these multiple environments, or the integrated reporting to roll up the capacity data, there is no control. Managing capacity is perhaps the first, and in most cases the biggest step, toward a more proactive IT environment. Capacity monitoring, alerting and reporting (across all platforms and environments) is how IT departments can recognize and fix problems before they happen.

  • Take Away: It’s important to look for IT capacity dashboards that can monitor, alert, and report across multiple platforms and environments to give IT a unified and accurate view of total capacity. That’s how IT starts moving from reactive to proactive and increases productivity dramatically.
  • Additional Resources: Six Essentials to Capacity Management

Cost

The second factor to consider is cost. Forrester reports that 68% of IT Executives say software and hardware and tool consolidation is the key to cost cutting. New tools can greatly reduce your annual software spend by decreasing the amount of monitoring point tools you have. Having too many points tools leads to wasted time and budget when constantly deploying, configuring, maintaining, updating and paying annual renewal fees. Not only that, but a unified dashboard for one, clear view of IT is nearly impossible with multiple tools or modules and leaves IT trying to cobble together a mix-mash of point tools. That leads to false alerts, conflicting stories, inaccurate data and headaches. Not a good combination.

Another notable stat is that the largest single spend of the IT budget at 43% is on IT staff and contractors. It’s obvious that wasting staff time is a critical error. Legacy or incorrect tools may be wasting up to 40% or more staff time which will surely burn through your budget. A huge waste of staff time is when IT groups are using separate, disparate monitoring tools, which leads to difficulty finding where problems reside (server team, network team, application team, etc) before the problem can start to be resolved. The result is increased mean-time-to-repair and more IT department blame game. A single, unified view of IT solves this problem by getting the IT departments working from the same data source and on the same page.

The last cost consideration is the inability to measure quality of service. 75% of IT Executives can not accurately measure quality of service. It’s obvious that IT needs to show value to the business. This is why it is critical to set and report on IT Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Find a tool that makes setting, monitoring and reporting on IT SLAs easy, and that can be deployed and reporting in hours.

  • Take Away: Multiple monitoring point tools and suites with too many modules are expensive and waste staff time. Consolidate tooling to make your IT more productive and save on budget.
  • Additional Resources: The Unified IT Dashboard
  • Take Away: Get started setting, monitoring and reporting on SLAs.  It can be an great way to prove the value of IT and departments can start small and get the quick wins first.
  • Additional Resources: The SLA Way to IT Success White Paper

Datacenter EfficiencyTying it all Together

The easiest way to initiate change is to find better IT tools for your teams use. If you are currently considering a unified IT Systems Management suite for your IT infrastructure, there is no better time than to start now. Look for a unified monitoring solution that will fit for your budget, meet your needs, solve your problems, and can scale to grow with your business. An easy-to-use solution with fast deployment and simple configuration will greatly assist with setup. Enabling IT with an intuitive ITSM suite that will get the job done will make IT more proactive in meeting SLAs, as well as helping solve immediate problems quickly and easily.

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What Everybody Ought to Know about Capacity Planning

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

Capacity Planning has been a “hot” topic of discussion amongst the IT community for a while now. We’ve gone through this topic in length on this blog, whitepapers and webinars (see related resources below). In our most recent blog post about IT capacity demands during peak seasonal periods, we established that correct capacity management is a gold mine; mis-managed capacity is the Titanic.

 

Is Capacity Planning Important to my datacenter?

Capacity PlanningCapacity Planning is essential in any IT data center to ensure the performance and availability of IT services and applications. Companies cannot succeed without the IT infrastructure they depend on so it is critical to balance capacity needs, while keeping costs in line.

Successful Capacity Management requires a unified view of your IT Environment. Far too many companies out there spend too much on additional capacity; meanwhile, they have the internal capacity readily available. This is due to lack of visibility into the critical capacity information needed to make the right decisions. This is particularly a problem in mixed vendor environments, multiple platforms and multiple data centers.

 

How do you get complete capacity visibility and reporting to implement effective capacity planning?

Effective capacity management starts with these basics:

  • Capacity PlanningGet accurate and granular capacity insight across all platforms and infrastructure (right down to the bare metal), so you can make high-level decisions and become more proactive
  • Find under-utilized capacity and re-allocate it to where it’s needed
  • Slow down spending on new equipment until existing servers are operating at over 60% and VMs are at a minimum of 90%
  • Get visibility and reporting that can monitor, measure and report on global capacity
  • Collect deep historical data in easy-to-view reports and charts to trend data and proactively
    forecast future capacity needs

 

 

If you are looking for a capacity management and reporting solution, the right tool should answer these critical questions:

  1. How much total capacity do we have?
  2. How much capacity are we currently using?
  3. When and where are we going to run out of capacity next

 

Ultimately, the right ITSM tool will need to empower IT to optimize performance, reliability and efficiency of the IT services it delivers to the business, and its clients, at the best cost. For IT departments with both physical and virtual infrastructures, capacity management will mean the difference between becoming the organization’s gold mine or it’s Titanic. Which do you want to be?

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Additional Resources:

Related Blog Posts

Capacity Planning: Do you Know your Virtualized Environment?

Key to Capacity Planning is Knowledge

The Do’s and Dont’s of Capacity Planning

Manage Capacity and Avoid Downtime During the Holiday Season

Related Whitepapers

The 6 Capacity Planning Essentials

Related Webinar

3 Simple Steps for Total Control of IT Capacity

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Reduce Energy Waste and Sprawl in your IT Infrastructure with Capacity Planning

Thursday, October 18th, 2012

Recently, there was an article talking about data centers wasting vast amounts of energy. Although it spoke primarily about the super-data-centers from some of the big players and service providers (i.e Facebook, Google, Amazon), the same can be said about almost any data center.

Running any number of servers efficiently not only requires a lot of thought and preparation beforehand, but it also requires continual attention to how they’re being used. This is especially true if virtualization is in the mix since it gives IT more power and control over the resources they have available. What used to take days or even months to order a new server now only takes a few seconds with virtualization. This double-edge sword of power also makes it that much easier to shoot ourselves in the foot by allowing us to waste resources on servers that are no longer used and over-provisioning the resources we do have. These types of problems can be simplified into two main problems: Capacity Management and Sprawl.

If we’re just waiting for email alerts telling us that our disks are getting full, we can get into trouble. This is great if we want to stay at the proactive stage of monitoring our environment, but if we want to get more proactive, we’ll need to start analyzing data and reports to determine which systems will need more space in the future. Capacity Management helps us detect potential issues before they become a problem. It can also help us track down odd resource behaviors on systems that should be fairly stable or differentiate between regular spikes of utilization and an actual outage. If your monitoring solution doesn’t have the reporting tools necessary for this, is it really doing enough for you?

Sprawl happens when we have servers (physical or virtual) that are no longer being used but are still taking up space and resources; essentially costing your business money. This can be very difficult to track since a virtualized environment can be constantly changing every second, and you don’t have time to wait for your monitoring solution to catch up. Having an all-encompassing monitoring solution that provides visibility across your entire application stack, including the virtualization layer, and includes important reporting features out of the box is what every enterprise who’s interested in saving money should have already. Yes, up.time has all of these things, and more, so if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet have a look at our free trial here.

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Building a Better Capacity Planning Process

Monday, October 15th, 2012

I was recently re-reading a post I wrote back in May of this year entitled “Is your Capacity Planning Evolving to Meet Business Demand”  where I discussed how new technologies represent both challenges and opportunities for IT executives when it comes to capacity planning and the importance it plays in helping businesses grow:

“IT executives need new and more effective capacity planning processes in order to really take advantage of new technologies by optimizing the placement of applications according to criteria such as service level and cost. In addition, capacity planning software and tools can help teams be more effective.

One tactic you might consider as a start is to elevate your capacity planning team. Get it out of the “back room” of IT operations and make it a strategic function. Yes, remove it completely from IT operations and centralize it as a corporate IT function that reports directly to the CIO. This will send an important message to your organization and capacity management will begin to evolve and operate decentralized from technology support groups, such as network, server and storage.”

 

I present some ideas in this post including a high level model, roles and skills that will help you create a new and strategic capacity planning function within your IT organization.

First off, to be clear, the strategy of creating a strategic capacity planning function involves much more than just assigning the job to one or more technologists, giving them some great software (like up.time) which helps produce all kinds of automated reports that show CPU, storage and network capacity trends, and then holding weekly meetings to look at consumption charts. You need to have the team (or individual if you are starting with a team of one) focus on your business from “the big” picture” perspective.

Ideally your new and improved capacity planning process will look something like this:

 

 

This new capacity planning process (ideally a 3 person team or function) should consider assuming the following new roles and developing specific supportive skills including:

 

 

Building a new capacity planning process and supporting it with these roles and all the skill sets you need may not happen overnight. But the shift in the way your teams will start to think and plan for enterprise capacity will have profound and lasting benefits to your business. I hope these ideas help you in your quest of building a better and more strategic capacity planning function.

 

 

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Capacity Planning: Do you Know your Virtualized Environment?

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
Remember, the key to capacity planning is knowledge. You cannot manage something you don’t know.  And to stay on that point, since VMware is probably the most popular virtualization technology available, I want to elaborate on VMware capacity planning.

 

up.time communicates with VMware’s vCenter to get all sorts of data and metrics.  For capacity management, we tie all that information neatly into easily digestible reports.

One of these reports is the vSphere Workload Report.  It enables you to visually see the resource usage at the data center, cluster and ESX server level as well as resource pools, vApps and the virtual machines.  With this knowledge in hand, you can easily determine if you are maxing out your VMware environment or if there’s room to better utilize your resources.

 

Quite a lot has been said about our capabilities on VMware but that is not the only virtualization technology we work with.  Another one that we have coverage for is IBM’s LPARs.  The LPAR Workload Report shows the CPU, Memory, Network I/O & Disk I/O for all the LPARs on a pSeries server. The graphs are stacked so not only can you see how the LPARs compare to each other, you also gain insight into the overall workload on your pSeries server.  This empowers you to accurately adjust the CPU entitlements of the LPARs and keep track of the overall workload over time!

Capacity planning might sound like a difficult task to tackle but through my last few posts, I hope I have shed some light on how up.time can assist in fulfilling your capacity management needs.  If you haven’t already done so, download a free trial of up.time and see what it can do for you!

- Patrick

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Never Run Out of Disk Space Again with Capacity Management

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

Get Better Capacity ManagementLast time, we showed how you can quickly determine if you need more hardware based on how much CPU is being used in your data center.  I can hear some of you screaming…”DISK!  What about disk??  How do I know when I will run out of disk??”

 

And you know what, you’re absolutely right.  You should be thinking about your disks as part of your capacity planning initiatives.  If you are still unsure why you should care about capacity planning, take the flood in Thailand as an example.  Hard drives have shot up in price since the flood.  If you can foresee when you will run out of disk space (and how long you can live without it), maybe you can avoid paying an arm and a leg for additional capacity when you really don’t need it yet.  How?  Look no further than your trusty up.time Monitoring Station!

IT Capacity Growth Report

See File Capacity Growth Over Time!

 

By using up.time’s File System Capacity Growth Report, you can quickly see how your file systems are filling up.  This single pane of glass report takes the specified period and calculates how the file systems grow/shrink.  For example, if you selected to report on a one-month period, the delta shown will be the rate at which the file systems are growing/shrinking for the month.  Therefore, you can arm yourself with this information and be able to plan when you will need to buy more disks.

How long until YOUR VMware disk space is all gone?

 

 

If you are using VMware, you have additional tools in your arsenal to succeed at capacity management.  up.time can calculate approximately how long it will take to fill up your VMware datastores… automagically!  It tells you, in English, if your datastore will be full in 3 months, 1 week, or whatever the case may be, so you won’t be caught off guard by running out of disk space.  What makes this even cooler, is that we do it agentlessly!  Just add your vCenter or ESX servers to up.time (which takes about 5 seconds) and you will be able to see into your VMware future with the up.time VMware datastore crystal ball!

 

Free Capacity Management Webinar: 3 Simple Steps for Total Control of your IT Capacity.

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Key to Capacity Planning is Knowledge

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012


Put your books way.  This is a capacity planning and capacity management quiz.  How many of these questions can you answer?

  1. How many resources are you using across your entire datacenter?
  2. What is using those resources?
  3. What is the utilization trending towards?
  4. Can you add more load to your servers?
  5. When will you run out of capacity?
  6. Will you gain much from virtualization?
  7. Do you know which servers you should virtualize?
  8. If you are already virtualizing, are you using your resources optimally?

 

Times up.  So how did you do? If you don’t have it memorized, I sure hope you have answers to the above at your fingertips, as those are some very typical questions that CIO’s would ask.  Most people view datacenters as cost centers, and for good reason.  Rising energy costs make headlines everyday and, given the slow recovery of the economy, we are constantly being asked to do more with less.  However, how can you do more with less if you’re not even sure of what you already have.

If you didn’t do so well on the test, I’ll let you cheat a little.  Download and install a trial of up.time.  For those of you who use or have heard of up.time, you might only know up.time as a monitoring tool.  However, there’s much more to the up.time solution than you may realize (and it’s already included in the tool): capacity management.  up.time has loads of features to help you perform capacity analysis.  There are many examples and success stories of how up.time can solve your capacity pains but let’s focus on one common scenario.

Example #1:

Your system administrators come to you saying they need to buy “X” number of servers because they are running out of CPU power.  You, as a diligent manager, know that the executives are never pleased with additional budget requests. So, before you put your neck on the line  for more money, you need to quickly verify what your admins said  is true. Fear not, my friend.  Simply pull up the up.time web UI and generate an “Enterprise CPU Utilization Report” for your entire datacenter in about 3 clicks.  Voila!

 

In seconds, you can easily see how much resources your servers are really using.

 

This is just one of the many examples of how you can use up.time for better, faster, and easier capacity planning.  We will be sharing more on how you can use up.time to address your capacity analysis needs over the next few weeks.  Stay tuned!

 

 

 

In fact, join us for a Free Webinar on Capacity Planning and Capacity Management:

- Patrick

 

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