IT infrastructure capacity and performance planning are vital to delivering responsive, cost-effective infrastructure. A key ITSM feature, infra leaders can use methodologies to proactively justify investments, improve business satisfaction, and lessen the possibility of SLA infringements due to deficits.
Overview
Major challenges that most organizations encounter today are the lack of skills needed to perform capacity management effectively, which at times has re-emerged as a critical competency for I & O (Infrastructure and Operations), specifically when affecting cloud computing services. The rising need for agile infrastructure, including but not constrained to cloud solutions, requires a mix of new and old-style infrastructure management systems. Investments in infrastructure-wide planning are thought-provoking for most organizations for the reason that capacity and performance management are often implemented and accomplished in technical silos, and often practiced and inconsistently reported organization-wide.
An effective, well-rounded governance is a requisite if the infrastructure capacity and performance planning procedure is to grow and develop into a business value. As in this case, Gartner recommended the following:
● Appointing capacity and performance process managers.
● Segmentation of services by criticality and bimodality to distinguish the necessity of dissimilar methods for diverse services.
● Consistently designed a process with the correct objectives and supported these objectives with relevant functions, systems, and tools.
● Utilization of Gartner’s 12 key systems in governing the I&O capacity management process, and
● Implementation of a constant process enhancement from the very first day you start to administer the process.
IT Capacity and Performance Administration Process
At the very first, the capacity and performance process administrator and the team should concentrate and think on improving the effectiveness, practicality, and precision of the capacity policies and prototypes by getting feedback from various stakeholders and crafting modifications where applicable. Tangible continual enhancement is always part of every profession, practice, and service. Thus, effective capacity and performance management needs close collaboration amongst those in charge of capacity planning, performance examination, and optimization processes. All of this is acknowledged in ISO 20000, ITIL, IT4IT, and other various sources of guidance.
There are some very highly virtualized and cloud-oriented sectors of the infrastructure that can strengthen the implementation and execution with a high gradation of automation, scalability, and flexible resource availability, or even capacity-on-demand technologies, which will lead to a close-to-real-time capacity planning and optimization strategy within the physical boundaries of the infrastructure. It is, however, discovered that many organizations have adopted highly virtualized technologies, which have led to cost reductions that were in the initial business proposals.
Further down the line, the mounting storage problems and network necessities of neoteric services, like the VoIP (voice over IP), the integrated communications and desktop videos, entail augmentations to the conventional viewpoint of capacity planning that makes organizations turn into more service-centric. As such, careful IT infrastructure capacity and performance planning are in general essential in virtualized and cloud environments to prevent the repercussions of a virtual machine straggling across the infrastructure, besides too many cloud incidents.
Firstly, effective governance of the IT capacity and performance process demands a documented covenant among the process owner and stakeholders with respect to the scope, goals, metrics, functions, accountabilities, and the process throughputs, markedly the capacity strategies, simulations, and other artefacts. Process owners and managers can deliver impressive service improvements with clear, well-defined accountabilities. Once the required process inputs and tools are well-documented, external service providers may be identified.
Effective Governance
Effective governance of IT infrastructure capacity and performance management process requires explicit practices. These must be practiced in the organization and contracted to service providers. For the successful governance of infrastructure capacity and performance planning, these essential practices must be identified, to wit.
> The process must have well-defined goals and be tracked by means of both qualitative and quantitative metrics and key functioning statistics. These metrics should be associated with the categories used to govern IT as a whole.
> The process owner must also be a member of an IT service management team. These service management teams must at all times regularly appraise and reassess the IT infrastructure and capacity management process, and in all likelihood invest in and enhance the process whenever needed.
> Must be both extrapolative and proactive in capacity and performance planning by utilizing apposite technology, including IT analytics operations, APM (Application Performance Monitoring), and extrapolative analysis.
> Pinpoint consumers who are using the outputs from the process and
deal with their
necessities and their expectancies of the process outputs. Seek out an ever-tighter link with those accountable for service-level administration and business affiliation.
> Take hold of the invaluable data and probabilities that arise out of the most important or high-precedence incidents that transpire, specifically when forthrightly directed to capacity or bandwidth restrictions. These incidents are particularly damaging to IT’s reputation if ever they happen in private clouds, hence, take all the necessary steps to stop them with meticulous preparation and monitoring. Using both outages and performance stoppages as an opportunity to pinpoint how to fortify the performance management system and make use of capacity planning to make the business a lot stronger and less tenuous.
> Every domain or service must delineate its capacity and performance data requirements based on the inputs and sources of data required to generate the output artefacts. Specific data will emanate from IT sources, although most of these data vis-à-vis demands would come from business sources, such as, for example, business targets and strategies.
> Do not permit the projections and reports to turn fusty and anticipate requirements to usual modifications. As an element of the continuous upgrading activity, plans, policies, simulations, reports, and other file formats should evolve in a controlled manner that enables users of the information to make IT and the business more stable, stronger, and extra resilient.
> Regularly reassess and review the business preconditions and process goals to make sure the business is grabbing all its erudition opportunities to develop resiliency and extra competitiveness. Ensure that process goals and metrics mirror the present needs of the business.
> Hired skilled staff and retained them. Technical professional staff should always practice the capacity and performance management process. The process guidance must recognize that the capacity planners are skilled people; in-depth instruction on how to collect data will not be necessary. With these in practice, process guidance will now be a focus on the availability of the true data, in the true format, at the true time, for the benefit of the data consumers. The formats and milestones must be mandated and responsively shared with all contributors to improve their plans and make the organization better and stronger.
Continual Improvement is the Responsibility of Everyone
Continual improvement is not only the responsibility of a few but of everyone within the organization. It is a must that for all people involved in the process, such as process owners, team leaders, and service providers/owners, maintain a catalogue of improvements, and must also agree on vital improvement metrics. An equally vital process, customers, notably the service governance management team, must agree on what priorities to focus on in their effort to elevate performance.
Most, if not all, organizations begin with the most basic tools, such as spreadsheet models, which eventually will become a liability due to increasing process maturity and infrastructure complexity. As a result, when it is highly apposite to do so, organizations must provide a good part of their investment in capacity planning and capacity management tools that would provide planning capabilities, modeling, real-time visibility, and optimization for their dynamic, modern IT environments.
Well- directed capacity and performance
management guarantees dependable, steadfast service functioning and logical
procedures across the infrastructure, avoiding exigent and unintentional
investments. The IT Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Management Process has
all the necessary potential of becoming a focus for the organization’s learning
from anxieties and uncertainties, such as service changes, service incidents,
and market evolution. As it matures, the benefits and opportunities grow better.