IT admins overseeing complex IT infrastructure are often delegated with the unenviable task of decision-making that can impact every facet of an organization, as well as make or break the IT infrastructure's health and performance. In an environment with a high margin of error, IT professionals need conclusive, in-depth reports at their disposal to make informed decisions. Poor decisions, costly omissions, or mistakes are crucial in a world where infrastructure's performance and organization's business performance are closely linked.
To make better decisions, IT admins need to be on their toes, assessing as much information as they can about different ends of the infrastructure. An area that needs continuous attention is capacity of the infrastructure that directly determines whether the needs of the organization are met promptly and efficiently. In the absence of proper capacity planning, an infrastructure can experience a number of issues.
Capacity planning is about continuously evaluating the current capacity of the infrastructure and predicting future capacity requirements by analyzing disk utilization, performance, storage, and other metrics.
When capacity planning is non-existent, or done improperly, it can pave the way for:
ManageEngine OpManager Plus continuously monitors CPU, memory and disk, keeping you abreast of health, performance and capacity of these components. With individual forecast reports for each of these components, you can preempt impending capacity needs and started with resource allocation.
Forecast reports use current and previous performance data to predict the future growth and degrowth trends in resource utilization. The reports can be filtered according to a specific timeline like "today, yesterday, this week, last week". You can also compare the existing trends with past performance, using "this month, last month, this quarter, this year and last year. "
The CPU forecast by utilization report shows the overall CPU utilization of network devices including servers. CPU usage directly determines the processing speed of applications and when the usage is beyond the optimum threshold, it can affect the server user interface, along with the applications, bringing a disruption in the infrastructure. With CPU forecast reports, you will be promptly informed of exceeding CPU usage levels, letting IT admins optimize the infrastructure for performance improvement.
Disk forecast by utilization generates reports that are built on current performance and usage levels. Current performance statistics are then used to predict the utilization trend going into the future. The reports also segment utilization into classes (for example 80%-90%, or 90%-100%) and notifies when the utilization levels cross the optimum threshold, giving IT admins the time to take corrective measures.
Memory forecast by utilization brings up reports showing the prediction for average memory utilization from the available memory in the infrastructure. If the utilization trend is in the region of 80%-90% and above, it is time for IT admins to work on freeing up memory space so that associated processes remain unaffected.
OpManager Plus comes with more than 10 reports dedicated to storage utilization. This includes storage summary, redundant array of independent disks (RAID) capacity utilization, growth trend, RAID forecast by utilization, disk input/output operations per second (IOPS) and more. The RAID forecast by utilization report enables you to predict when your storage might reach 80%, 90%, and 100% of its capacity. It predicts the storage space availability using the current usage rate and usage growth rate, helping you to avoid any kind of data loss due to delay in disk addition. With RAID forecast report combined with other types of storage reports, you can elevate your capacity planning efforts, ensuring lack of capacity never surfaces as a bottleneck in your infrastructure.
Monitoring and managing traffic flows is vital to ensure the infrastructure doesn't experience network slowness. With OpManager Plus NetFlow Add-on forecast reports, IT admins can track the traffic from a source like IP group, interface, access point and SSID group, and measure the traffic by volume, speed and utilization parameters.
Application performance and availability can be optimized using application forecast reports. You can measure layer 4 and layer 7 types of application, from interface or IP group source, of both incoming and outgoing traffic. After selecting source, you can choose from the top five applications, single application, or add custom applications to create custom application forecast report.
Observability is a critical component of the modern IT enterprise and their network infrastructure. OpManager Plus' forecast reports feature achieves observability into the IT infrastructure by collecting data on CPU, memory, disk, storage, network traffic flows and applications. The data and the insights derived can then be used to identify trends and patterns in infrastructure usage, enabling IT admins to predict future capacity needs and optimize accordingly. The advantage gained by the organization at large is, low instances of network slowness and an enhanced customer experience. Learn more about OpManager Plus