The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Capacity Planning’

« Older Entries

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.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Capacity Planning, IT Management, management, monitoring, Service Level Monitoring, sla, Virtualization | No Comments »

Stop the IT “Blame Game” and Get a Single Source of Truth!

Friday, February 22nd, 2013

My landlord just kicked me out.  Let me rephrase that.  My landlord just politely asked me to leave his property before my lease is up.  Thanks to him, my wife and I have been packing our stuff in preparation of our move.  In all honesty, my wife has been doing most of the packing.  I asked her to pack up all her belongings and kitchenware and I would do the rest.  Somehow, that message got lost and she packed my things too.  When I needed to look for my shoes and  couldn’t find them, I was upset.  I reiterated how I asked her to only pack her stuff but she said I never said her that.  Before I knew it, the blame game was in full effect.  It was her word versus mine.

These kind of things happen in IT infrastructure management too.  When you have more than one tool to monitor your environment and more than one data source for capacity planning, how do you know which one to trust?  The justification for IT environments to use a variety of monitoring tools is that their current set of tools cannot provide all the visibility they need.  For example, some tools are strictly for network monitoring.  Others might go really deep in Windows monitoring but light on everything else.  What’s worse is if there is an overlap in the metrics from each tool, so which one should you go with?  Different tools will gather metrics in different ways and at different time intervals.  One tool might catch a spike while another may not.  It is a full time job just to consolidate data and close information gaps to make sense of it all.

Here is where up.time is different.  up.time provides unified monitoring for all the silos within an IT infrastructure so you can have a true ‘single pane of glass’.  You don’t have to duct tape point tools together to make a homemade Swiss army knife.  up.time IS the swiss army knife and provides a unified and comprehensive view.  It makes capacity planning a breeze because it provides a single data source so you don’t have to try to make sense all the differing metrics!  You can eliminate the blame game (and headaches) in IT when you don’t have multiple tools telling you different things.  You don’t have to go to war with the network team arguing whose data is right when you have a standard tool providing a single view of the truth.  up.time is the solution that enables you to be the IT superstar.  Download up.time and give it a spin today!

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Application Monitoring, Capacity Planning, IT Management, IT operations, monitoring, Network Monitoring, Server Monitoring | No Comments »

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?

_____

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

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Capacity Planning, IT Management | No Comments »

Manage Capacity and Avoid Downtime During the Holiday Season

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012

Online Shopping and Capacity PlanningComing down to the last month of the year, most people are thinking about spending time with their family and what kind of gifts they should get for their loved ones.  While there are still some people that are hesitant on purchasing goods online, the convenience of shopping in your PJ’s is definitely taking over.  According to statistics, the top 3 spending days are Cyber Monday, Green Monday (who knew this existed?) and Free Shipping Day (another day I’ve never heard of).  While shoppers love the ease and convenience, online retailers have to be absolutely sure they can handle the influx of shoppers.

The issue outlined is essentially what capacity planning is all about.  We have discussed capacity at length through a number of posts (See related posts below).  But what if even after doing your due diligence and you still didn’t have enough capacity?  How can you be agile so you can meet the demands of the screaming shoppers? For the users running VMware with vCenter Orchestrator, you can easily integrate it with up.time so if up.time detects an outage or degraded performance, Orchestrator can easily spin up more instances to lighten the load of your servers.  Even if you aren’t using VMware, you can still use Action Profiles to assist in automating the increase of capacity with up.time!

As the statistics show, those of you in retail will probably be smiling this time of the year.  However, if you are not properly managing your capacity, it could be a disaster.

Happy holidays everyone! :)

-Patrick

Related Capacity Planning posts:

Key to Capacity Planning is Knowledge
Never Run Out of Disk Space Again with Capacity Management
Cradle To The Grave – Virtualization Capacity Management

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in automation, Capacity Planning, Server Monitoring, Virtualization, VMware, VMware Monitoring | No Comments »

Demystifying Cloud Monitoring

Tuesday, November 6th, 2012
Every few years, a new IT buzzword comes by.  A few years ago, virtualization was the hot topic and it still is.  Lately, the buzzword is cloud.  I knew cloud computing had gone mainstream during a chat with my technologically-challenged aunt.  When I explained to her what kind of software we sell, she asked if we can monitor the cloud.  My jaw dropped and thought to myself..really? Is this the same person who called me long distance about her mouse not working and only later found out it wasn’t plugged in? Going off a tangent here but who else hates being IT support to everyone around, you just because you work in IT?
So does up.time monitor the cloud? Of course!  But how?  To answer that question, we need to define what cloud really is.  Let’s see what Wikipedia says:

Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network

 

What does that mean?  It just means the servers are hosted somewhere, connected by network.  This sounds suspicious like…

A data center or computer centre (also data center) is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components

 

Putting it all together, all cloud computing means is that some servers are being hosted in a facility where the systems are all connected in a network.  That also means monitoring the cloud is not a whole lot different from monitoring your data center. You still have your servers/OS’s to monitor.  You also need to monitor the applications.  What else?  How about the network?  What about reporting on SLAs?  Don’t forget capacity planning to see if you will need to spawn off more servers in the cloud.  All these can be done with up.time.  up.time provides visibility into your entire IT infrastructure, whether it is hosted in a public cloud (e.g. Amazon’s EC2) or in a private cloud (i.e. in your data center).
Cloud computing has taken IT by storm.  If you have put your infrastructure in the cloud or just thinking about it, you don’t have to worry about how to monitor it.  Download up.time or contact us and let up.time be your eyes in the cloud!

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Capacity Planning, cloud, Network Monitoring, sla, Virtualization | No Comments »

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.

 

 

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Capacity Planning, IT Management, IT operations, management, monitoring | No Comments »

Is your Capacity Planning Evolving to Meet Business Demand?

Friday, May 11th, 2012

 

As an IT systems management vendor, we get fired up about new technologies including the latest buzz around virtualized capacity, automation and cloud. We respond by building slick tools, dashboards and reports to help solve capacity problems. I believe that’s what (we) systems management providers are supposed to be doing, helping you solve problems. <shamelessplug> Reducing the complexity of capacity planning and management is something we do really well around here at uptime software! </shamelessplug>

capacity planning

Capacity Management is all about evolving IT Operations.

But what about the capacity planning function itself? Does it not need to evolve along with these new deployment technologies? Do current capacity planning functions contribute value to the business by helping them scale to meet demand?

Virtualization, automation and cloud technologies give IT execs more options than ever before in how services will be delivered to the business, but do their current capacity planning processes reflect this same evolution in technologies? For most the answer is still likely “no”.  Most IT organizations still seem to perform capacity planning at the individual component level (server, network, SANs) which does not represent the true capacity requirements of their global facilities and infrastructure resources. The good news here is that you CAN evolve and turn this situation around.

Planning and managing IT capacity at a macro level is critical to delivering cost-efficient and reliable business services in a time frame the business expects. The good news is that today’s virtualization and automation technologies allow flexibility and new cost alternatives so IT execs can choose from a myriad of platforms to run applications and services on. The bad news is that these new virtual and cloud based resources are certainly not free and without new capacity planning processes, the benefits of easy procurement and instant provisioning can quickly turn into over-allocation and cost overrun nightmares.

  • So the message is clear: 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.

capacity planning software

But Rome wasn’t built in a day….

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in automation, Capacity Planning, cloud, IT Management, IT operations, management, sla, Systems Management, Virtualization | No Comments »

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

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Capacity Planning, IT Management, monitoring, Systems Management, Virtualization, virtualization vmware, VMware | No Comments »

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.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Capacity Planning, IT Management | No Comments »

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

 

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Capacity Planning, IT Management, uptime | No Comments »

« Older Entries