The purpose of Capacity Management is to match the capacity of the IT services and infrastructure to the current and future identified needs of the business. Capacity Management focuses on the complete spectrum from design and planning of service capacities through the operational aspects of service capacity.

See the definition of capacity.

Read the Capacity Management Key Concepts.

Important links

• Capacity Management Tool Mentors
• Tivoli® Open Process Automation Library Extensions for Capacity Management

Outcomes

As a result of the successful implementation of the Capacity Management process:

• IT always has the capacity to meet the expected (agreed) current and future identified needs of the business
• Scalability requirements of the business are understood and accommodated
• Incidents caused by lack of capacity are averted
• The cost of capacity acquisition is reduced by planning and optimizing capacity usage.
  

Scope 

The process covers the range from understanding service requirements, determining component capacities, and the design and deployment of capacity to meeting expectations. It collects and analyzes data relevant to application and infrastructure utilization and performance in order to determine whether there are potential problems and issues that need to be addressed.

ITIL® defines three focus areas which are addressed by Capacity Management. Each uses the primary activities of the process decomposition in differing ways, to differing end results.

• Business Capacity Management
  • This focus area is responsible for ensuring that the impacts of future business requirements for IT services upon IT resources are considered, planned, and implemented in a timely fashion
• Service Capacity Management
  • This focus area is the management of the performance of the IT services used by the customers. It is responsible for ensuring that service performance is monitored, measured, and reported; and meets business requirements and agreements
• Component Capacity Management
  • This focus area is the management of the performance, utilization, and capacity of individual technical components possessing finite resources

Includes

• All aspects of the Performance Management discipline
• Interfacing with Demand Management on Service Demand Forecasts
• Component capacity management (both as it affects in-house service operations and with consideration of impacts to and requirements upon service partners)
• High-level service capacity monitoring
• Determining the requirements for space and other facilities that will result from capacity proposals and plans

Excludes

• Low-level system capacity monitoring (Service Execution)
• Generalized human resource management (Workforce Management)
• Designing and implementing the facilities needed to support capacity plans (Facilities Management)

Key performance indicators

• Percent utilization of IT technology resources
• Return on capital of IT technology resources
• Workload throughput of IT services
• Accuracy of projections of business capacity planning, IT service workload planning, and IT service demand
• Number of agreed upon service level agreements (SLA) and operations level agreements (OLA) with performance metrics
• Percent of SLA and OLA performance metrics that can be proactively maintained through automatic resource provisioning
• Percent of IT resource usage covered by SLA and OLA with performance metrics
• Customer satisfaction with SLA and OLA performance parameters and attainment
• Percent of SLA and OLA performance parameters attained
• Percent of SLA and OLA performance parameters clearly prioritized based on the value of the service or agreement
• Value of SLA and OLA performance parameters attained versus not attained
• Accuracy of performance attainment projections throughout period
• The elapsed time and direct costs
  • In this process domain
  • In each process step and between steps

Relation to other processes

• Capacity Management often provides assessments of proposed change requests for Change Management.
• The amount of service capacity may affect the perceived availability of a service.  In addition, the availability of service components may affect the overall capacity of a service.  For these reasons, this process has a strong relationship with Availability Management.
• Incident Management and Problem Management both provide information to help Capacity Management plan for adequate capacity.
• Capacity Management creates capacity targets for service level agreements in Service Level Management and also provide reports to support service reviews. New or updated SLAs, OLAs, and UCs from Service Level Management or Supplier Management should be of interest to Capacity Management.
• Events from Event Management and incidents from Incident Management may indicate capacity disruption.
• Service-related costs from Financial Management may affect the allocation of capacity to services.
• Change Management may authorize changes that affect service capacity.
• The deployment of capacity-related changes are made using Release Management and Deployment Management.  

For more information

For more information, see Capacity Management in the ITIL documentation.

In addition, see the IBM® Service Management Web page.