I know our latest IT comic is a bit of an exaggeration – it’s not only to make you chuckle but also think. How do you plan for infrastructure capacity when the business delivers new requirements to you? Is most of that time planning consumed by manually gathering all the performance data needed to then input into spreadsheets or calculate on your own?

The importance of capacity planning has been known for some time now but it may be more prevalent than ever before in today’s fast-paced mobile age where being first to market with business services can determine a company’s success or failure.

When infrastructure bottlenecks wreak havoc with a day one application launch, the repercussions of rolling back a customer-facing application for remediation aren’t just the unplanned operational costs. They include bad customer reviews and a negative impact on the company image.

What is capacity planning about?

Capacity planning is about improving the following:

• Time to value

• IT’s support of company initiatives

• The company’s support of customer expectations

• The customer’s improved value received from that service.

Here are a couple of real life examples of how our customers have improved their capacity planning and become predictive:

• Wells Fargo, one of the top five banks in the U.S. has been utilizing CA Capacity Management for several years to manage the many IT challenges associated with such initiatives as their merger with Wachovia and the release of their mobile banking application. Wells Fargo app and systems engineer Chris Lee said: “Wells Fargo’s Digital Channel has not had an infrastructure capacity related outage for more than seven years.”

• CA powers the capacity planning success of one of the largest U.S. telecommunications companies ensuring the successful launch of the most popular smartphones on the market today to guarantee revenue, the success of marketing campaigns and most importantly customer ordering and activation. Its capacity planning team said: “We have had 12 successful product launches to date. We have gone from capacity modelers to capacity analysts with the new automated forecasting and modeling features within CA Capacity Management.”

Start planning and stop fire fighting

I know you’re asking yourself this question now: “How can I do capacity planning when most of my time is spent fighting fires?” or like Kip and Gary: “We’re just a team of two IT guys; we don’t have the staff or time for starting a capacity planning practice.”

Even a small IT staff can be successful at capacity planning when they have automation and self-service analytic features at their fingertips – in the same interface as your real-time network, infrastructure and data center monitoring. Imagine knowing not only how your business services are performing in real-time but also having confident insight into how they will perform in the future? A capacity analytics dashboard with consumption trends, projections and recommendations is just a few clicks away – no guesswork or fortune-teller needed.

Let’s face it, you may still have to fight some fires today but I guarantee you’ll be able to prevent most of the fires of tomorrow – and isn’t that really the point?

Has your organization been thinking about capacity planning but hasn’t pulled the trigger yet? Take a look at this entertaining CA-sponsored comic series in which Kip & Gary highlight some of the other challenges IT and facilities teams face every day.

Which one is your favorite? Cast your vote.

They may just convince you to redefine your infrastructure management approach.

The post I see predictive capacity planning in your future appeared first on Highlight.