ITIL Capacity Management:

Much More Than Charts Over Coffee

Rich Fronheiser
Metron-Athene, Inc.
Speaker Background

 BS, Mathematics, Juniata College (PA)

 MBA, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
(December 2006)
 ITIL Foundations Certified (2004) and Service
Manager trained (April 2006)
 Capacity Planner/Performance Analyst in
Utilities, Transportation, and Insurance Fields
 Two stints in “vendor-land”, including the last
3 years with Metron
Why the Title?

 A decade ago, there were few servers

 Main part of job was to look at charts and find

anomalies in data – very resource, not service
or business focused

 The day started early, hence lots of coffee was

involved
Agenda…
 A Brief Introduction to ITIL and ITIL Capacity
Management

 Discussion of Capacity Management in Practice

 Implementing ITIL Capacity Management

• Interfaces to other ITSM processes

 Review
 A Brief Introduction to ITIL
and ITIL Capacity Management
ITIL is
 The IT Infrastructure Library - books & definitions
• Service Support & Service Delivery
• Business Perspective, Infrastructure, Development, Service Management
 Good practice for managing IT
 Basis of BS15000 and moving towards ISO20000
 Developed by UK’s OGC in the 90’s
 itSMF
• The IT Service Management Forum for ITIL users
• Promotes exchange of info & experience
• Europe, North America, Australia, Asia, Africa
 Business
OGC & ITIL framework Infrastructure
Service
Application
How to Manage People
Successful Planning to Implement Service Management
Programs
Service
Management
How to Manage
Change Service

Products
The ICT
Practice

Business Delivery Infrastructure

Perspective Management
Risk Service
Management Support

Security
PRINCE2 Management
and other OGC
Applications Management
books
Processes
ITIL overview
Business Objectives

IT Strategy

Operational IT Processes Tactical IT Processes

Service Support Service Delivery
Service Desk function SLM, Management of:
Incidents, Problems, Changes, Finance, Capacity,
Releases, Configuration Availability, Continuity
Capacity Management Balance

 Cost Against Capacity

• Ensuring that processing capacity is cost-justified and also making
the most efficient use of those resources

 Supply Against Demand

• Ensuring the available supply of processing power matches the
demands made by the business, both now and in the future

 Service Level Agreements

ITIL Capacity Management objectives
 Ensure the right level of IT investment
 Identify and resolve bottlenecks
 Evaluate tuning strategies
 Improve and report/publish performance
 “Right-size” or “consolidate”
 Ensure accurate and timely procurements
 Ensure effective service level management
 Plan for workload growth, new apps / sites
 Avoid performance disasters
ITIL Capacity Management Levels

Business CM Iterative Demand

Demand Modeling
Modeling Application
Application
Service CM Activities: Management
Management Sizing
Sizing
Resource CM Monitoring
Monitoring
Analysis
Tuning
Tuning
Implement

Capacity
Capacity Management
Plan Database
Capacity Management sub-processes

 Business Capacity Management

• Ensuring future business requirements for IT services are planned,
and current service provision is business aligned

 Service Capacity Management

• Management of the performance of live, operational IT application
services

 Resource Capacity Management

• Management of the individual components of the IT infrastructure
Capacity Management at the Resource level

 Identify and understand the Capacity and utilization of

each component part of the IT infrastructure
 Recommend optimization of hardware and software
 Measure and store resource usage at a process level
 Identify bottlenecks and potential future problems
 Characterize workloads and business drivers
 Evaluate alternative upgrades to meet workloads
 Proactive rather than reactive
 No surprises in performance or IT budgets
Capacity Management at the Service level

 Identify and understand the IT services

 Assess their use of resources
 Identify their working patterns, peaks & troughs
 Ensure that SLA targets are viable
 Monitor performance to identify violations
 Resource data aggregated by application
 Pre-empt difficulties wherever possible
 Proactive rather than reactive
Capacity Management at the Business level

 Published corporate performance objectives

 Standard local metrics defining contribution
• Unification of analytical information
• Improved managers’ business insight
• Greater local accountability via KPIs
• Resource data aggregated by application and then weighted
 Enterprise framework for measurement
• Published Reports and exception reports
• Automated alarms and interpretation
• Interactive Dashboard for alert/drill down
• Predicted outcomes across framework
 Business agility to adjust as necessary
• Strategic modeling to view scenarios
• Ensured focus and drive to growth
• Effective liaison between IT & Management
Capacity Management Activities
 Iterative Activities
• Monitoring
• Analysis
• Tuning
• Implementation

 Demand Management
 Modeling
 Application Sizing
 Storage of Capacity Management Data
 Production of the Capacity Plan
ITIL Capacity Management Inputs and Outputs

Inputs Outputs
Business Capacity
Technology Management Capacity Plan
SLAs SLA guidelines

Business Plans Thresholds

Service Capacity Charging
Operations Management
Audits…
Budgets…

Resource Capacity
Management

Sub-Process
Capacity Management Inputs
 Technology
 SLAs, SLRs, and Service Catalogue
 IT Plans and Strategy
 Business Requirements and Volumes
 Operational Schedules
 Deployment and Development Plans
 Forward Schedule of Changes (Change Management)
 Incidents and Problems (Incident Management and Change Management)
 Service Reviews
 SLA Breaches
 Financial Plans
 Budgets
Capacity Management Outputs
 Capacity Plan
 Capacity Management Database
 Baselines and Profiles
 Thresholds and Alarms
 Capacity Reports (regular, ad-hoc, exception)
 SLA and SLR recommendations
 Costing and charging recommendations
 Proactive changes and service improvements
 Revised operational schedule
 Effectiveness reviews
 Audits
Capacity Management in Practice:
Utility Company, mid-1990s
Looking Back, A Simpler Time
 Few distributed servers, even fewer critical apps running on them
• No web-based applications or e-commerce
• Most complex work still on mainframe

 Many analysts, few systems

• Only dozens of systems, not hundreds or thousands
• Many analysts hired to carefully study data from those systems

 Capacity planning was Resource-oriented, not Business/Service

oriented

 Decisions were made based on resource numbers and trending to

specific utilization figures
Charts over Coffee…
 Early morning look at performance graphs with
lots of coffee

 8AM operations meeting – help-desk tickets

covered with expected input from capacity
management – purely reactive

 Much of the workday revolved around looking at

charts, drinking coffee, and being purely reactive
Consequences…
 Decisions to upgrade or purchase hardware were frequently made
late, after performance problems started happening

 Little coordination and planning with business

 Lack of well-designed iterative processes and tools to support

those processes limited the amount of information

 Little CM involvement in application sizing yielded poorly sized

applications
Data Center vs. Business Units
 Business managers have little knowledge of performance analysis
and capacity planning

 Business users understand and relate to data related to the

business

• If this application gets busier than 127 orders/minute, we will need to

consider server and network upgrades

 Performance analysts and capacity planners are more effective and

can get more recommendations accepted if they try to use business
terms whenever possible
Data Center vs. Business Units
 Analysts provide highly technical reports using resource
consumption numbers and other metrics virtually meaningless to
business unit management
• Example: The CPU is 94% busy and we’re doing 200 I/O operations per second!

 Rather than challenge cryptic reports, business units would

frequently let questions go unanswered

 Focus was (and still is in many places) on resources, not on

services or the business, and certainly not the customer or end-
user experience
Capacity Management in Practice:
Insurance Company, early 2000s
Fast Forward…
 2003 – Over a thousand Unix, Linux, and Windows servers, with
about 75% delivering production services, many of those e-
Commerce and other web-based services

 Many services are distributed across multiple tiers, including the

mainframe, and many of the applications are complex, web-based
applications that require a lot of specialized knowledge to manage

 Number of performance analysts hadn’t really changed – 5 people

managing 50 servers in 1997 had to manage 000s in 2003.
How was it done?
 Automation of as many processes as possible:
• Data capture and collection
• Processing of data into the CDB
• Reporting
• Monitoring/Alerting
• Workload Characterization
• Trending

 Business focus and involvement

 Modeling, application sizing, demand management

 Regular capacity plans – Business, Service, and Resource

 Much of ITIL Capacity Management in place

ITSM CMMI
# CMMI ITSM

5 Optimised
bITa
4 Measured
3 Proactive ITIL
2 Reactive ITSM ITSM

1 Ad hoc
0 Inert Service center
ITSM CMMI per app per site per stage
# CMMI ITSM CapMan Task %
5 Optimized bITa Business level Dashboard 2%
CPM
4 Measured ITSM Service level SLAM, Cap Plans 10%

Service
Catalogue
3 Proactive Center Resource level CDB, Trends 30% 
Web
reporting
2 Reactive Tickets Analysis Utilization, uptime 55%
Some event
monitoring
Implementing ITIL Capacity Management
It’s a project….
 Identify sponsor
 Identify project team
 Identify process owner
 Ensure proper funding available
 Determine scope of project
 Develop mission and vision
 Determine SMART objectives
 Communication and awareness campaign
Gap Analysis
 Necessary to implement ITIL CM
 Where are we today?
• People – current responsibility for Capacity Management
• Process
• Tools – already in use
• Current budget
• Current requirements by other ITSM processes
 Where do we want to be?
• Improvements that need to be made
• Benefits identified
• How improvements can be implemented
• Project plan – timescales, staffing, costs, activities, outputs
Design the process…
 Structure of Capacity Management
• Centralized vs. distributed
• Resource CM – platform oriented?
• Service CM and Business CM – end to end?
• Tools – in use and needs identified by gap analysis
• Monitors – in use and needs identified by gap analysis
• Capacity Database (CDB)
- Centralized, distributed, or hybrid approach?
- Business data, service data, resource data, financial data
• Capacity Plan
• Integration and interface with other ITSM processes
Tools, tools, tools…
 Evaluate, Select, Implement

• Capacity Database (CDB)

• Modeling tools
• Analysis tools
• Reporting tools
• Statistical packages
• Etc.
Implement the Process…
 Establishing monitoring and the CDB
 Train staff
• Install, setup, use monitors
• Analyze information
• Make and implement tuning recommendations

 Business Capacity Management

• Link resource and service data to SLAs and SLRs
• Plan and produce the capacity plan

 Service/Resource Capacity Management

• Tune service/resource performance if necessary
• Implement demand management, if necessary
Design the process…interfaces?
 ITIL Capacity Management should NOT be
designed in isolation
 Consider the other Service Support and Service
Delivery processes
 What will be providing information to ITIL CM?
 What processes will benefit from ITIL CM?
Close interface with Service
Delivery processes…

 Vital element of planning process

• Financial Management (budgeting, accounting, charging)
• Availability Management (metrics, input to capacity plan)
• IT Service Continuity Management (model ITSCM scenarios)
• Service Level Management (police SLAs, help set SLAs)

 Close work with other processes improve all

processes, including Capacity Management
Close interface with Service
Support, too…

 ITIL Capacity Management provides support for

all operational performance and capacity issues

 The more the service support processes rely on

capacity management, the better those processes
will be, as well
Interfaces between ITIL Capacity
Management and Service Support

 Incident Management
• PROVIDES – Information regarding incidents regarding capacity and
performance
• RECEIVES – Diagnostic tools to assist with Incident Management

 Capacity management keeps Incident

Management (and Problem Management)
informed via automatic alerts and recording
known errors
Interfaces between ITIL Capacity
Management and Service Support

 Release Management
• Capacity Management can help with release strategy (network
bandwidth considered for a network distribution, for example)
• Capacity audits can be used to delay releases if there is insufficient
capacity

 Configuration Management
• Capacity Database is a subset of the CMDB
• CMDB provides technical, service, utilization, financial, and
business data – without this data, Capacity Management cannot
function effectively
Interfaces between ITIL Capacity
Management and Service Support

 Problem Management
• Specialist support to identify, diagnose, resolve capacity-related
problems
• Supports proactive Problem Management through analysis and
identification of trends

 Change Management
• Represented on Change Advisory Board (CAB) to assess the impact
of changes on capacity
• Additional capacity requirements and recommendations are
requests for change (RFCs)
Review…
 Metrics
• Utilization of resources and services recorded in CDB?
• Right level of data being captured and recorded?
• SLAs policed and SLM notified of breaches?
• Reports produced at right level and on time?
• Capacity Plan produced and accepted by management?

 Critical Success Factors

• Accurate forecasts
• Understanding of current and future technology
• Demonstrating cost-effectiveness
• Knowledge of business plans and the ability to incorporate in the Capacity
Plan
In summary…
 Many companies are doing a pretty good job of ITIL
Capacity Management without realizing it
 A gap analysis will help best align a company’s
Capacity Management process to ITIL
 Capacity Management is not done in isolation –
Capacity Management relies upon other ITSM
processes and also is relied upon by those same
ITSM processes
 Ongoing improvement of Capacity Management not
only makes CM better, but all of IT and ITSM and the
business as well