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ITIL and Capacity Management

admin — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 15:57:46 +0000

I have been aware for a while that the IT infrastructure library (ITIL) contains a section on Capacity Management. There is, however, relatively little information that is publicly available about ITIL and the way that it is fitted together. (A summary of ITIL is available here.) As a member of the BCS I found a summary of the foundations of ITIL on the 24×7 books site that membership provides access to. Possibly more interesting, however, is the following article that provides some description of the ITIL Capacity Management, along with a simple example of an ITIL Capacity Plan: ITIL Capacity Management Deep Dive

In essence the ITIL approach to capacity management and that which is outlined in Sarquol’s “Principles of Capacity Management” White paper are very similar. The Sarquol Whitepaper provides some information on the “How to…” of Capacity Management and provides less information on the products and activities that are needed. The way that ITIL is constructed is documentary and procedural in nature, which is consistent with the overall objectives that it is seeking to meet. As the basis of a capacity management process it is intended to provide a foundation on which to construct an organisation’s service management approach. As would be expected, however, there is a long way to go from the definition provided by ITIL and a fully worked out process.

I can strongly recommend the design and organisational implementation of a mandatory performance and capacity management approach. If this is to be started then examination of ITIL Capacity Management will provide a strong basis for the early design. If, of course, you need help in such an initiative then Sarquol would be able to provide expertise and support. Please contact me at dh@sarquol.com, or call on +44 7887 536083.

Monitoring all user interactions

admin — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:54:37 +0000

Last year (in this article) I asserted that monitoring of all user operations on an on-going basis was highly valuable. At the time I was not aware of any automated tools to do this task, meaning that solutions would need to be implemented on a per-application basis. In the worst case, this could mean laboriously adding logging statements into application code and then providing analysis mechanism to extract meaningful information from this logging.

There have been tools available to inject traffic into a system and monitor that data for a while. There have also been tools available to allow such monitoring on a one-off basis when a problem is known or suspected. This doesn’t, however, really go far enough in overall system monitoring since both approaches would usually be used retrospectively. It would seem, however, that the tool manufacturers have started to fill this gap in the performance monitoring market.

The Compuware “Vantage” toolset is a good example of this class of tool. This suite has included a strong range of monitoring, investigation and analysis tools so some time. They have now added a “passive monitoring” facility that starts to meet the requirement to be able to monitor the performance of all client transactions. If you would like to know more about this particular toolset then Compuware have published a fact sheet about it here.

From the news… SOA – the next big performance problem

admin — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 10:20:42 +0000

It would seem that “Service Oriented Architecture” (SOA) is taking off as a technology in fashion. As usual, most of the news is generated by people wanting to sell it as the next big thing ready for the prime time. If followed as it is being sold at present, the concept is liable to lead to significant performance problems. SOA is sold on having a large number of “users” who are then often other systems. This is followed all the way back to the real users through an unknown number of tiers. The complexity of managing this sort of architecture increases significantly as the number of tiers increases. If this is then managed without due consideration for managing the system capacity and performance the result will be problems in the future. That is not to say that I don’t see a benefit in the overall technology – there is great potential. Just consider carefully how the performance of operational systems might be proven to be sufficient for the long term.