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IT Exam | Capacity Management

IT Exam: Capacity Management

Capacity management is a founding discipline of computing. As computing capacity exploded and costs for resources, including cpu and memory, plummeted, there was a shift away from rigorous capacity planning. In this economic climate, wasteful spending is frowned upon and can limit careers. GTP has been a thought leader in capacity planning for years, advocating responsible expenditure. Many of the topics raised in this quiz date back to the late 60's and 70's. We have updated them to today's computing environments. Hopefully, this quiz will provide an opportunity to reflect on where your organization's capacity planning stands and how to progress.

Take our exam below to see where you stand in this process.

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by
Jeff Drew, Practice Director, Application and Systems Performance
and
Herschel DeCouto, Independent Consultant - Performance and Capacity Planning


1. What does Capacity Planning mean to you?	a) Throw a dart on the vendor sales literature then buy whatever it hits. b) Keep buying capacity till I run out of money then hide the utilization data so know one finds out how much money we wasted. c) Load testing till it crashes d) Determine number of users, the impact of each user to the system and the total number of simultaneous users each system can support. Correlate it to the business forecasts for each application.
2. Does your organization have a documented Capacity Management Architecture and an implementation roadmap?	a) It's around here somewhere b) Some consultants did some Visio diagrams 3 years ago old c) Well-documented architecture and implementation roadmap under Change Control, blessed by the management
3. What does Capacity Management mean to you?	a) Capacity Planning b) Capacity on demand c) Total Enterprise IT Resource Management d) All of the above
4. Do you have a well-defined Capacity Management process in place?	a) Buy more as soon as we need it. b) No one ever yelled at us for having too much Capacity - yet... c) The process is documented.
5. Have you defined roles and responsibilities of the various organizations in any workflow related to the Capacity Management process?	a) Well-documented roles and responsibilities. b) No c) We make them up as we go along and as people cycle in and out of the organization.
6. Can you map steps in the Capacity Management process to performance benefits in the affected applications?	a) Huh? b) When the phones stop ringing there's enough capacity. c) We compute the ROI for Capacity Management to justify it's existence.
7. Does your Capacity Management system derives feeds from or feed the following systems?	a) Performance Management Systems b) Network Management Systems c) Modeling tools d) Application Instrumentation including NFU's(Natural Forecast Units) plus b and c.
8. Do you have products and tools with overlapping functionality?	a) Some b) None -- completely mutually exclusive c) Few but their roles in the overall architecture are well-defined
9. How do you manage Capacity of the underlying infrastructure?	a) Wait for user complaints b) Wait for "CNN Moment" and then get budget to buy more hardware c) Proactively monitor and identify potential capacity issues before they impact users
10. Do you have forecasting or trend reporting in place?	a) We figure the longer we wait the cheaper things get and just buy as we go. b) We apply thresholds on various performance related parameters and track them c) We use Analytical and/or Simulation Modeling tools to forecast capacity requirements into the next procurement period. Then we implement the new capacity and circle back.
11. How do you evaluate Capacity Management products?	a) Given the economic conditions and tight corporate budget, strictly based on price b) Technical feature set c) A combination of vendor viability, our end-to-end infrastructure management architecture and capacity management requirements
12. How do you know that there is a capacity issue in your infrastructure?	a) Our users call us to let us know b) There is a threshold trigger event on our network monitoring console c) The issues are identified and addressed proactively based on trending analysis
13. Do you have systems and processes in place to localize a capacity issue?	a) No b) Only by trial and error c) Yes. Can break it down to components in service path
14. Do you monitor applications and servers?	a) Only ping availability b) Ensure service or daemon process is up c) Execute Synthetic transaction's from client to server d) Analyze actual Transaction response times from logs
15. Have you identified capacity metrics you want to collect and report upon	a) A few b) We capture all infrastructure capacity in a big database but don't prioritize what's important c) All relevant Capacity Metrics by infrastructure component type. d) Natural Forecast Units (maps Business Process Units of Work to Infrastructure utilization, e.g. orders executed per second, widgets sold on ecommerce site)
16. Do you use Capacity Management reports to	a) Justify tuning efforts b) Manage Service Level Agreements with internal and external customers and vendors c) Forecast into the next procurement cycle d) All of the above
17. How well have you instrumented your infrastructure to support Capacity Management functions?	a) Utilization instrumentation b) Response time and utilization instrumentation c) Natural Forecast Units plus above
18. How do you manage network capacity?	a) Monitor aggregate enterprise wan utilization trends keeping in mind bandwidth and equipment procurement lead times. Perform New Application rollout network impact studies. b) The network is never the problem. It's those pesky applications. c) Run everyone on Gbit Ethernet to the desktop - that'll fix everything. d) Watch WAN link or ATM PVC utilizations - if it's gets close to 70% put in upgrade request.
19. How do you know if an application is ready to be deployed on the net?	a) Regression testing was successful b) QA load and regression testing were successful. c) Full application certification process is in place. If the applications fails the certification, it doesn't deploy on the production network.
20. How critical are internal SLAs to you?	a) SLA's only get you in trouble. b) Our users have been asking for it, we are not there yet c) We allocate our costs to various users and departments based upon SLAs agreed upon with them.