The capacity planning analyst can rely on SharePath to provide detailed resource consumption data to drive capacity planning models.
The capacity planning analyst can rely on SharePath to provide detailed resource consumption data to drive capacity planning models.
The capacity planning analyst has a unique challenge: understand the projected business volume, yet be knowledgeable in translating business transactions into technical transactions. Added to this checklist of qualifications is expertise in the throughput and performance of processors, networks, and storage systems. The combined knowledge of these three dimensions is used to project the hardware resources that are necessary to meet the client demand for processing business transactions.
Calculating required demand is a challenging project. Transactions do not arrive at predictable rates Monday through Friday. Differences in demand exist by hour of the day, day of the week, week of the month and month of the year. Holiday schedules and flexible work schedules also impact the demand equations.
The capacity planning analyst must also be aware of the changes being made to the systems that support the business. For example, increases in functionality can result in increases in resource consumption. Decisions being made to re-platform applications have a direct impact on the overall capacity projections and plans.
Given this complexity, it is important for the capacity planning analyst to have detailed knowledge of business volume projections. Capacity planners must be able to translate business transaction volumes into demand for IT transactions and fully understand the application performance management strategy along with the service level agreements that have been committed to.
Once an overall plan has been established, it is critical that the performance against the plan be monitored and reported, ensuring that the demand generated from business transactions is fully understood. Capacity planning analysts must utilize tools to group technical transaction resource consumption into business transactions. This grouping can be a challenge at times because many of the capacity planning tools in existence today are unable to perform this grouping.
Once the grouping has occurred at a high level, it’s important to dive deep into the application software stack and completely understand the makeup of the components. This process is similar to creating a bill of material for physical products being manufactured. Each business transaction should be described with a bill of materials documenting each technical transaction and the components of those technical components. The capacity planning analyst can then begin to create capacity consumption models once an accurate bill of materials exists for business transactions.
SharePath is a unique product capable of grouping technical transactions into business transactions. SharePath also excels at providing detailed resource consumption data to drive capacity planning models. Learn more about SharePath and transaction-based capacity planning.
