Capacity Management

Process Supervision

Capacity Management is a continuous and iterative process that monitors, analyses and evaluates the performance and capacity of the IT infrastructure and, with the data obtained, it optimises the service or submits an RFC to Change Management.

All the information obtained in these activities, and that generated by Capacity Management using that information, is stored and recorded in the Capacity Database (CDB).

Monitoring

The main objective is to ensure that the performance of the IT infrastructure matches the requirements of the SLAs.

As well as technical aspects, monitoring needs to include details of licences and other administrative information.

Analysis and Evaluation

The data collected needs to be analysed to assess whether corrective action needs to be taken, such as requesting an increase in capacity or better Demand Management.

Optimisation and changes

If it is decided that capacity needs to be increased, an RFC will be raised and sent to Change Management to set in train the whole process involved in implementing the change. Capacity Management will lend its support throughout the process and it will be jointly responsible, together with Change Management and Release Management for ensuring that the change requested meets the envisaged objectives.

In the case where a simple rationalisation of demand will be enough to resolve the deficiencies or noncompliances with SLAs, Capacity Management itself will be responsible for managing this sub-process.

Capacity Database

The CDB must cover all the business, financial, technical and service information received and generated by Capacity Management in relation to the capacity of the infrastructure and its elements.

Ideally, the CDB must be interrelated with the CMDB so that the CMDB is able to give a complete image of the systems and applications and includes all the information about their capacity. However, this does not mean that the two databases cannot be "physically independent".