ITIL Capacity Management

Capacity Management is the discipline that ensures IT infrastructure is provided at the right
time in the right volume at the right price, and ensuring that IT is used in the most efficient
manner.
This involves input from many areas of the business to identify what services are (or will be)
required, what IT infrastructure is required to support these services, what level of
Contingency will be needed, and what the cost of this infrastructure will be.

Capacity management is made up of three

subprocesses:

Business capacity management

(BCM)
Service capacity management
(SCM)
Resource capacity management
(RCM)

These subprocesses all share a common set of activities that are applied from different
perspectives. They include the following:

Modeli
ng
Service
monitoring
Performance
management
Demand
management
Workload
management
Analy
sis
Change
initiation
Optimizati
on
Trend
analysis

These are inputs into the following Capacity Management

processes:
· Performance
monitoring
· Workload
monitoring
· Application
sizing
· Resource
forecasting
· Demand
forecasting
·
Modellin
g

From these processes come the results of capacity management, these being the capacity plan
itself, forecasts, tuning data and Service Level Management guidelines.

Capacity Management Overview

Mission Statement
To ensure that all current and future capacity and performance aspects of the IT infrastructure
are provided to meet business requirements at acceptable cost.

Process Goal
Achieve the process mission by
implementing:
• ITIL-aligned Capacity management policies, processes and
procedures
• Dedicated Capacity Management Process
Owner
• Business Capacity Management to forecast capacity needs based on business
events
• Service Capacity Management to ensure capacity levels support established service level
targets
• Resource Capacity Management to ensure capacity levels are provided for at the individual
IT device level
• Actions to ensure appropriate levels of capacity have been built into new IT
Solutions
• Periodic and ongoing forecasting for capacity needs based on both business and technical
input
• Ongoing monitoring and analysis of current performance to ensure appropriate levels of
capacity have been provided and resources are optimally tuned

Critical Success Factors (CSFs)

The Critical Success Factors (CSFs)
are:
• Providing Accurate IT Capacity
Forecasts
• Providing Appropriate IT Capacity To Meet Business
Needs

Key Activities
The key activities for this process
are:
• Perform demand management for business, service and resource capacity
activities
• Perform modeling for business, service and resource capacity
activities
• Provide application sizing for business, service and resource capacity
activities
• Provide capacity plans for business, service and resource capacity
activities
• Perform capacity monitoring, analysis and tuning
activities
• Implement capacity-related
changes
• Control storage of capacity data for capacity
activities
• Provide management information about Capacity Management quality and
operations.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Examples of Key Process Performance Indicators (KPIs) are shown in the list below. Each one
is mapped to a Critical Success Factor (CSF).

Providing Accurate IT Forecasts

• Total dollars in unplanned capacity

expenditures
• Total dollars in unused capacity
expenditures
• Percent of capacity forecasts that were
accurate
• Number of inaccurate business forecast inputs
provided

Providing Appropriate IT Capacity To Meet Business Needs

• Number of incidents related to capacity/performance

issues
• Number of SLA performance targets missed due to
capacity