Put your books way. This is a capacity planning and capacity management quiz. How many of these questions can you answer?
- How many resources are you using across your entire datacenter?
- What is using those resources?
- What is the utilization trending towards?
- Can you add more load to your servers?
- When will you run out of capacity?
- Will you gain much from virtualization?
- Do you know which servers you should virtualize?
- 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:
- New to up.time? Learn more and sign up here: Webinar – 3 Simple Steps for Total Control of IT Capacity.
- up.time Customer? Learn more and sign up here: Webinar – Master IT Capacity Management in Minutes.
- Patrick



