Effective capacity management has become a critical differentiator for IT organizations. Those that can’t effectively evolve their capacity management practice will continue to struggle with complexity and negligible insights into capacity sizing and the impact of changing demand and resulting service/application performance. However, those that gain advanced capacity management capabilities will be able to more effectively right-size investments, support key IT projects, and align resources with business objectives. This paper offers a practical look at capacity management, outlining the six key steps IT organizations can take to realize capacity management that delivers maximum value.

Escalating competitive pressures, tight budgets and scarce capital resources are working in concert to intensify the importance of true alignment between IT and the organization it supports. But many of today’s enterprises are noticing a decided gap between what the business demands of IT and the realities of what IT can deliver.

IT organizations are increasingly being called upon to cost-effectively deliver reliable support for the entire catalog of business services, or risk outsourcing to a managed service provider. Previously, capacity planners and IT architects would use historical trends to predict capacity requirements and simply over-provision to account for any peaks caused by seasonality, error, or extraneous influences like mergers & acquisitions. Over-provisioning, combined with poor lifecycle management of new resources provisioned in the data center, has led to capacity utilization and inefficiency issues. While historical data is great for understanding past issues and current state of the environment, the performance of servers, hosts and clusters is not linear; at some level of saturation, the performance of that infrastructure will quickly start to degrade.

Today’s customer and employee profiles look very different than they did just a few years ago. These tech-enabled, highly connected buyers are using many different platforms to research, shop and work. They’re engaging brands in new ways—through social networks, as well as mobile and cloud-based applications. And with all their newfound capabilities, they’re expecting more from their business interactions.

This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) whitepaper examines why unified IT monitoring is an important enabling technology for both enterprises and management service providers, including both the organizational and strategic impacts as well as the business case surrounding it. It goes further to examine CA Nimsoft Monitor as an example of unified IT monitoring, and reviews three case studies where the solution has been deployed for active use in a unified manner.