Outputs from monitoring, analyzing, and reporting activities are examined and actions to tune individual resources or to re-balance the available capacity are planned and initiated through Change and Release Management. They can also be performed through the Service Desk in the case of simple requests to other support groups or self-help for users. Some recommendations might involve changes in the way that the users use the IT systems. This can include simple recommendations, like moving discretionary workloads to off-peak periods or performing a business function using a more efficient IT service path. Other changes can take the form of balancing services, changing concurrency levels, and adding or removing resources. The cycle then begins again, monitoring any changes made to ensure they have had a beneficial effect and collecting the data for the next day, week, or month.

Service and resource tuning enables effective utilization of IT resources by identifying inefficient performance, excess or insufficient capacity, and making recommendations for optimization. It can balance the need to maintain service while reducing capacity capability to reduce the cost of service.

Understanding the combined performance impact of various components within a complex infrastructure is needed to accurately differentiate symptoms from actual problems. This level of understanding provides the most accurate baseline for future planning. Analysis and tuning can reduce support costs by identifying performance and availability problems, often before they impact your business operations or users. Using this information, decisions can be made to better allocate resources to those areas with the highest business priority.

Recommendations can be made to improve the performance of off-the-shelf applications or unique in-house business applications.
This activity examines the monitored workload demand for servers, middleware, and applications under management. It can sense if performance has degraded and determine what actions need to be taken, either by provisioning and configuring servers, operating systems, middleware, applications, storage, and network devices.

It can be reactive in response to unpredicted business activity. For example, the existing infrastructure provisioning is inadequate relative to increased demand. It can also be done reactively, if a dependent IT infrastructure component is faulty or not working to its expected performance specification. Based on examining performance of resources over time, it can choose to adjust thresholds and warning levels.

The activity can be performed proactively. For example, workload policies are enforced to limit or increase the amount of resources consumed by a particular application or business function. Limitations and constraints can be applied to contain IT processing costs or differentiate the level of service received by one business function over another. Increases in capacity capability can be applied to manage unexpected increases in workload demand.

In summary, this activity makes decisions and performs or requests actions that will result in a better match between resource supply and demand.

Increasingly, the management of resource demand is being automated or semi-automated. Typically, workloads to be managed are expressed in a technology independent manner or virtualized for subsequent mapping onto a physical IT infrastructure. The tools that manage resource demand in this way are said to be performing orchestration or choreography.