ITIL - Capacity Management
Capacity Management ensures proper utilization of available resources and makes future capacity requirement available in cost-effective and timely manner. Capacity Management is considered during Service Strategy and Service Design phases.
It also ensures that IT is sized in an optimum and cost-effective manner by producing and regularly upgrading capacity plan.
Capacity Manager is the process owner of this process.
Capacity Management Activities
The following table describes several activities involved in Capacity Management Process −
| Sr.No. |
Capacity Management Activities |
| 1 |
Producing capacity plans, enabling service provider to continue to provide services of quality defined in SLA. |
| 2 |
Assistance with identification and resolution of any incident associated with any service or component performance. |
| 3 |
Understanding customer’s current and future demands for IT resources and producing forecasts for future requirements |
| 4 |
Monitoring Pattern of Business activity and service level plans through performance, utilization and throughput of IT services and the supporting infrastructure, environmental, data and applications components. |
| 5 |
Influencing demand management in conjunction with Financial Management |
| 6 |
Undertaking tuning activities to make the most efficient use of existing IT resources. |
| 7 |
Proactive improvement of service or component performance |
Objectives
The objectives of Capacity Management are as follows −
| Sr.No. |
Objectives |
| 1 |
Produce and maintain an appropriate up-to-date capacity plan reflecting the current and future needs of the business. |
| 2 |
Provide advice and guidance to all other areas of the business and IT on all capacity and performance related issues. |
| 3 |
To manage performance and capacity of both services and resources. |
| 4 |
Assisting with diagnosis and resolution of performance and capacity related incidents and problems. |
| 5 |
Assess the impact of all changes on the capacity plan, and the performance and capacity of services and resources. |
| 6 |
Ensure that proactive measures to improve the performance of services are implemented wherever it is cost justifiable to do so. |
Capacity Management Elements
Capacity Management broadly includes three components: Business capacity management, Service capacity management, and Component capacity management as shown in the following diagram −
Business Capacity Management
This sub-process deals with forecasting and developing plans for future business needs. It is done by using existing data on current resource utilization by various services.
Service Capacity Management
This sub-process deals with understanding the functioning of IT service, resource usage and variation to ensure that appropriate service agreement can be designed.
Component Capacity Management
This sub-process ensures optimizing use of current IT resource components such as network capacity, bandwidth etc.
Capacity Management Information System (CMIS)
CMIS maintains updated database of resources, commodities etc. which is used by all sub-processes within Capacity management.
