Capacity Planning / Elasticity
Manage the level of IT infrastructure resources that are needed to support the organization's business production requirements, to cover both peaks and troughs in demand.
Improvement Planning
Practices-Outcomes-Metrics (POM)
Representative POMs are described for Capacity Planning / Elasticity at each level of maturity.
- 2Basic
- Practice
- Put in place the basic policies, processes, and procedures to manage the performance, utilization, and capacity of IT resources at the individual IT component level.
- Outcomes
- Capacity management expertise is growing with technical silos actively managing capacity.
- Some processes become repeatable, with consistent results.
- Discipline is improving and helps to ensure existing processes are maintained during stressful periods.
- Metrics
- Expected increase/decrease in capacity utilization in the short and long term.
- # of thresholds set, that when reached will require additional capacity.
- 3Intermediate
- Practices
- Shift the focus from technical components to workload analysis.
- Develop trending and a trend analysis capability to predict performance bottlenecks in the near- and mid-term.
- Outcomes
- Capacity plans are regularly produced, reviewed, and actioned.
- Trend models are being used for forecasting.
- Metrics
- # of capacity plans reviewed and actioned.
- # of trend models.
- 4Advanced
- Practices
- Compile workload information across all tiers to analyse and report at a service level.
- Establish a dialogue across the organization to anticipate likely scenarios and to use analytical modelling to predict the outcome of those scenarios.
- Outcomes
- Capacity management is fully implemented and integrated across the organization, so that business objectives are defined and met.
- This facilitates the implementation of a chargeback mechanism that can yield fairer costs, based on utilization, and can influence usage patterns.
- Metrics
- # of service level capacity plans.
- # of capacity management communications.
- # of planned scenarios.
- 5Optimized
- Practice
- Use capacity management as a strategic solution that includes component, service, and business data, and is part of any continuous service improvement initiatives.
- Outcome
- The focus is on continuous improvement using incremental and innovative changes and initiatives.
- Metric
- # of capacity planning improvements/initiatives.