ITIL Capacity Management: Much More Than Charts Over Coffee

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ITIL Capacity Management Much More Than Charts
Over Coffee
Rich Fronheiser Metron-Athene, Inc.
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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

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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

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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

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A Brief Introduction to ITILand ITIL Capacity
Management
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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 UKs OGC in the 90s
• itSMF
• The IT Service Management Forum for ITIL users
• Promotes exchange of info experience
• Europe, North America, Australia, Asia, Africa

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OGC ITIL framework
Business
Infrastructure
Service
Application
People
How to Manage Successful Programs
Planning to Implement Service Management
Service Management
The Business Perspective
ICT Infrastructure Management
How to Manage Change
Service Delivery
Products
Practice
Risk Management
Service Support
Security Management
PRINCE2 and other OGC books
Applications Management
Processes
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ITIL overview
Business Objectives
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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

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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

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ITIL Capacity Management Levels
Business CM
Iterative Activities Monitoring Analysis Tuning I
mplement
Demand Management
Modeling
Application Sizing
Service CM
Resource CM
Capacity Management Database
Capacity Plan
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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

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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

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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

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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

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Capacity Management Activities

• Iterative Activities
• Monitoring
• Analysis
• Tuning
• Implementation
• Demand Management
• Modeling
• Application Sizing
• Storage of Capacity Management Data
• Production of the Capacity Plan

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ITIL Capacity Management Inputs and Outputs
Outputs
Inputs
Sub-Process
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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

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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

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Capacity Management in PracticeUtility Company,
mid-1990s
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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 were 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

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Capacity Management in PracticeInsurance
Company, early 2000s
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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 hadnt really
  changed 5 people managing 50 servers in 1997
  had to manage 000s in 2003.

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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

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ITSM CMMI
CMMI 5 Optimised 4 Measured 3 Proactive 2 Reac
tive 1 Ad hoc 0 Inert
ITSM bITa ITSM Service center Trouble
tickets Random calls Nil
ITIL ITSM
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ITSM CMMI per app per site per stage

• CMMI ITSM CapMan Task
• Optimized bITa Business level Dashboard 2
• CPM
• Measured ITSM Service level SLAM, Cap Plans 10
• Service Catalogue
• Proactive Center Resource level CDB, Trends 30
• Web reporting
• Reactive Tickets Analysis Utilization, uptime 55
• Some event monitoring
• Ad hoc Help calls Monitor Ad hoc alerts 3
• Ad hoc investigations

J
L
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Implementing ITIL Capacity Management
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Its 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

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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

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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

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Tools, tools, tools

• Evaluate, Select, Implement
• Capacity Database (CDB)
• Modeling tools
• Analysis tools
• Reporting tools
• Statistical packages
• Etc.

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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

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Design the processinterfaces?

• 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?

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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 companys
  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