Why is Capacity Planning crucial for running your business?

Businesses are successful when their resources are aligned with their capacity. No business can afford to have their resources run at full capacity, because at that point, any increases past the capacity would lead to increasing failures. Capacity Planning is an action plan to ensure there's enough spare capacity to handle any increases in the workload, and cater to unprecedented workload spikes.

Site24x7 and Capacity Planning

Capacity Planning in Site24x7 provides information about a group of monitors, and is used to determine the capacity required to optimize resources for a particular operation or workload. This allows you to plan, process, and procure additional resources based on the metrics-related data collected.

Before we get into the Capacity Planning discussion it is important to understand the need for free capacity, and how much buffer capacity is required. When planning, we might not be aware of potential and sudden workload increases, which means there exists a gap between our current and upcoming capacity plan. It is also important to understand how much capacity we need to add to each of our services so that we have enough free capacity buffer after the unexpected workload increase.

Why is Capacity Planning important?

Let's assume you run multiple resources to perform one application, the most challenging task here is finding the under/over-utilized resources. It is also difficult to monitor each resource individually, gather its performance metrics, and record their behavior. With Capacity Planning, you can bring all your resources together and can determine the required capacity for your infrastructure tier. Capacity Planning also allows you to track the size, space, network, and capability of resources, irrespective of the number. Additionally, Capacity Planning allows you to monitor the behavior of auto-scaling monitors based on the aggregated data collected for several instances.

For example, say there is an instance and a Capacity Planning monitor is created for it. If the instance is launched at 10am, it gets aggregated on the capacity monitor. Suppose the same instance is killed at 11am and another instance copy is launched at 11:01am with the same tag. The data from the new instance gets aggregated into the same Capacity Planning monitor.

Do more with Site24x7's Capacity Planning

Site24x7's Capacity Planning helps you view and track the capacity utilization of your resources based on metrics like CPU, memory, and storage. You can monitor the health or status of your resources under the capacity monitor. Forecasting is one of the core pillars of Capacity Planning and helps you manage the capacity of your resources in advance. It allows you to coordinate the workload amongst resources with Top-N/Bottom-N analysis. You can find the outliers—the data points beyond the average value—and maintain the quality of your resources. Diagnose service issues in your resources and drill down to the root cause of the issue.

Licensing  

Capacity Planning is available for all licensed users. You can add up to 50 Capacity Planning monitors for each Site24x7 account. For MSP accounts, you can add up to 50 monitors for each customer or Business Unit.