Monitoring System Capacity
Monitoring system capacity is done as part of an ongoing capacity
planning program. Capacity planning uses long-term resource monitoring
to determine rates of change in the utilization of system resources.
Once these rates of change are known, it becomes possible to conduct
more accurate long-term planning regarding the procurement of additional
resources.
Monitoring done for capacity planning purposes is different from
performance monitoring in two ways:
The reason for these differences stems from the goals of a capacity
planning program. Capacity planning requires a "big picture" view;
short-term or anomalous resource usage is of little concern. Instead,
data collected over a period of time makes it possible to start to
categorize resource utilization in terms of the impact of changes in
workload on resource availability. In more narrowly-defined
environments (where only one application is run, for example) it is
possible to model the application's impact on system resources, leading
to the ability to determine, for example, the impact of five more
customer service representatives running the customer service
application during the busiest time of the day.
Next, we will look at tools that make it possible to observe system
resource utilization.
