Practical Service Level Management: Delivering High-Quality Web-Based Services

Capacity Planning

Capacity planning is another key long-term operation. Many of the real-time technologies I have discussed implement policies that describe how the resources are divided among a set of competing services. Capacity planning ensures that there are enough resources in the future to make the resource allocation strategies work—no real-time strategy works effectively when its resources are over-subscribed.

The goals of capacity planning are similar to those for proactive management—to give the management team sufficient time to take the necessary actions to prevent a service disruption. In the case of real-time operations, the lead time is measured in minutes, whereas capacity planning works on the scale of weeks or months.

Capacity ...