Capacity planning and predictive analysis

The computer network is now an essential asset for most companies in the world. In a multiplexed and dynamic environment, one of the essential tasks of the IT department is to balance the use of resources at satisfactory levels, and in addition, with the lowest cost benefit. All these variables must be very well aligned with the corporate governance policies of the company, that is, meet the business demand effectively, both in technical and financial terms.

 In this sense, the market has progressively required an IT that has proactive methods, practices, and activities. Furthermore, decisions in this area will only be truly assertive and grounded if management is based on concrete data, that is, eliminating the “guesswork” that can often lead companies to undesirable situations.

 Capacity planning will contribute significantly to the study of the company’s network, considering three important factors: Demand, capacity and financial plan.

 What is the capacity of your network infrastructure today?

 What network infrastructure capacity will be required for your business in the future?

 These are some of the questions that we will seek to address clearly and objectively in this article.

 CAPACITY PLANNING

Capacity planning is a systematic organization that aims to balance the use of network resources so that they are not being underutilized. Or that the demand generated by the use of these resources is close to the capacity of the network infrastructure. In addition, balancing all these aspects of the business finances is also part of the scope of this plan.

In this sense, in order to be successful in this whole process, it is necessary to have a complete understanding of the current capacity of the technology park, so that, after this analysis, we should seek through predictive analysis to understand what the essential capacity requirements will be for future demand.

What is the current capacity of your IT infrastructure?

Adjustment action, reallocation of investments to underutilized resources, investments in resources close to their capacity and economy, all these factors will only become reality, if first, a Baseline of the IT environment is established, that is, the identification of a standard behavior of the statistics of the network objects. Data on availability, CPU consumption, memory usage, Latency and Jitter, packet loss, and the like, are important to be tracked.

Once Baseline is established, it is important to filter statistics that are vital so as not to compromise the availability of IT resources. By identifying these essential statistics, highlighting them from the other, that is, monitoring them with an attentive and centralized vision. The choice of these KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and their respective monitoring are practices intrinsic to the use of a network monitoring system, which provides you with all of this.

What will be the future capacity of your IT environment?

Having established the Baseline, we now have a daily database that will be essential for projecting the use of network resources in the future. One of the most prominent practices in good IT management is the ability of predictive analytics, a practice that supports data-driven management.

Predictive analysis

This type of analysis makes it possible to make decisions based on statistics that are projected into the future. This type of verification is much more careful, formal, and accurate than a simple intuition, which leads the company to make informed and assertive decisions. In this way, the company can prevent future problems such as outage, overuse of Bandwidth, among others.

The image below shows an example of TRAFip projection report of a link, the use of these types of reports helps a lot in preventing future issues that the company may face.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Therefore, it is undeniable the importance of investments in monitoring systems that will substantially assist in your capacity planning. TRAFip and SLAview have several types of reports available, such as projection. In addition, these tools provide various other possibilities of graphical analysis, dashboards, they also provide the configuration from simple alarms to the most complex ones based on historical behavior change, there are countless possibilities.

With this in mind, Telcomanager, Latin America’s leader in the software network management sector, in the market since 2002, with a unique and innovative methodology, provides intelligent solutions for data monitoring to give complete visibility to the customer’s infrastructure. This allows your company to keep track of the main aspects of your network.

Published on 05/13/2022