Manage Availability and Capacity

Purpose:

Balance current and future needs for availability, performance and capacity with cost-effective service provision. Include assessment of current capabilities, forecasting of future needs based on business requirements, analysis of business impacts, and assessment of risk to plan and implement actions to meet the identified requirements.

Objective:

Maintain service availability, efficient management of resources, and optimization of system performance through prediction of future performance and capacity requirements.

Description:

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Inputs:

• Requirements definition repository
• Requirements risk register
• SLAs and OLAs
• SLA and OLA revisions
• Confirmed acceptance criteria from stakeholders
• Approved high-level design specification
• Documented solution components
• Performance and capacity gaps
  
• Corrective actions
• Emergency escalation procedure
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Outputs:

• Availability, performance and capacity baselines
• Evaluations against SLAs
• Availability, performance and capacity scenarios
• Availability, performance and capacity business impact assessments
• Prioritized improvements
• Performance and capacity plans
• Availability, performance and capacity reports
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Controls:

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Task Instructions:

Assess Current Availability, Performance and Capacity and Create a Baseline

1. 1. Consider the following (current and forecasted) in the assessment of availability, performance, and capacity of services and resources: customer requirements, business priorities, business objectives, budget impact, resource utilization, IT capabilities, and industry trends.

   2. Monitor actual performance and capacity usage against defined thresholds, supported where necessary with automated software.

   3. Identify and follow up on all incidents caused by inadequate performance or capacity.

   4. Regularly evaluate the current levels of performance for all processing levels (business demand, service capacity, and resource capacity) by comparing them against trends and SLAs, taking into account changes in the environment.

Assess Business Impact

1. 1. Identify only those solutions or services that are critical in the availability and capacity management process.
   2. Map the selected solutions or services to the application(s) and infrastructure (IT and facility) on which they depend to enable a focus on critical resources for availability planning.
   3. Collect data on availability patterns from logs of past failures and performance monitoring. Use modeling tools that help predict failures based on past usage trends and management expectations of a new environment or user conditions.
   4. Create scenarios based on the collected data, describing future availability situations to illustrate a variety of potential capacity levels needed to achieve the availability performance objective.
   5. Determine the likelihood that the availability performance objective will not be achieved based on the scenarios.
   6. Determine the impact of the scenarios on the business performance measures (e.g., revenue, profit, customer services). Engage the business line, functional (especially finance), and regional leaders to understand their evaluation of impact.
   7. Ensure that business process owners fully understand and agree with the results of this analysis. From the business owners, obtain a list of unacceptable risk scenarios that require a response to reduce risk to acceptable levels.

Plan for New or Changed Service Requirements

1. 1. Review availability and capacity implications of service trend analysis.

   2. Identify availability and capacity implications of changing business needs and improvement opportunities. Use modeling techniques to validate availability, performance, and capacity plans.

   3. Prioritize needed improvements and create cost-justifiable availability and capacity plans.

   4. Adjust the performance and capacity plans and SLAs based on realistic, new, proposed and/or projected business processes and supporting services, applications, and infrastructure changes as well as reviews of actual performance and capacity usage, including workload levels.

   5. Ensure that management performs comparisons of actual demand on resources with forecasted supply and demand to evaluate current forecasting techniques and make improvements where possible.

Monitor and Review Availability and Capacity

1. 1. Establish a process for gathering data to provide management with monitoring and reporting information for availability, performance, and capacity workload of all information-related resources.

   2. Provide regular reporting of the results in an appropriate form for review by IT and business management and communication to enterprise management.

   3. Integrate monitoring and reporting activities in the iterative capacity management activities (monitoring, analysis, tuning, and implementations).

   4. Provide capacity reports to the budgeting processes.

Investigate and Address Availability, performance and Capacity Issues

1. 1. Obtain guidance from vendor product manuals to ensure an appropriate level of performance available for peak processing and workloads.

   2. Identify performance and capacity gaps based on monitoring current and forecasted performance. Use the known availability, continuity, and recovery specifications to classify resources and allow prioritization.

   3. Define corrective actions (e.g., shifting workload, prioritizing tasks, or adding resources when performance and capacity issues are identified).

   4. Integrate required corrective actions into the appropriate planning and change management processes.

   5. Define an escalation procedure for swift resolution in case of emergency capacity and performance problems.