Capacity Management
Practical Case
Up until now, Capacity Management at "Cater Matters" has been reactive, or in other words, capacity was increased or redistributed only when problems appeared.
With the increasing importance of IT services, both for the internal organisation of "Cater Matters" and for its customers, the management has decided to implement ITIL best practice for Capacity Management.
They have therefore appointed a Capacity Manager with the following main responsibilities:
- Monitoring the performance of the IT infrastructure, paying special attention to online services, as these are particularly important in providing a good service to customers.
- Analysing, in conjunction with Configuration Management, the impact of the various CIs on the system's capacity.
- Evaluating, in conjunction with Service Level Management, the process, storage and bandwidth loads the current and envisaged SLAs imply.
- Evaluating, in conjunction with Financial Management, the real cost of each service.
- Producing regular reports on the state of the relevant technology available for the services offered.
- Analysing trends and statistics on the use and load on the system.
The results of this work should allow:
- The preparation of an annual Capacity Plan which will be reviewed quarterly against the real data obtained from monitoring of the system, together with the business forecasts.
- The Capacity Database (CDB) to be populated so that it contains all the information relating to capacity.
- Improvements to the service to be proposed.
With the aim of:
- Minimising the number and impact of future incidents degrading the quality of service.
- Rationalising the use of IT infrastructure capacity.
- Reducing the cost of the IT infrastructure.
- Increasing productivity and customer satisfaction.
