1. OVERVIEW › 1.1 Primary Areas of Application
1.1 Primary Areas of Application
The objective of any capacity planning study is to ensure
that resources are available to provide the quality of
service required by an organization. Capacity planning
studies help to prevent resource shortages and save
organizations from expensive slowdowns and down time.
The capacity planning process is divided into five functions:
workload characterization, workload analysis and forecasting,
performance prediction, financial analysis, and presenting
the findings to management. A successful capacity planning
process includes all of these functions:
o Workload Characterization
Workload characterization is the ongoing analysis of the
workload structure, resource consumption by each
application, service levels, and system component
utilization.
Your organization may have already characterized your
workloads; if not, use the workload characterization
functions of the CA MICS Capacity Planner as described in
Chapter 11 of this guide.
o Workload Analysis and Forecasting
Workload analysis and forecasting is predicting growth in
existing applications and estimating the resource
requirements of new applications, and tracking and revising
these predictions, as appropriate.
The first step in analyzing and forecasting your resource
consumption is to gather data about your system. You can
use the facilities of the CA MICS Capacity Planner to build
a data base of the elements you want to use as the basis of
your studies. The process of defining files to build the
database is described in Chapters 2 and 3 of this guide.
The Standard Applications files, described in Chapter 2,
are predefined files that collect data contained in the
CA MICS database and build a Capacity Planner database.
Resource Element, Meta, and Business Element files,
described in Chapter 3, enable you to define the files to
collect and/or augment the data contained in the Capacity
Planner database.
Once you have defined your files and built your database,
the next step is to analyze and forecast the data.
The analysis and forecasting tools of the CA MICS Capacity
Planner fall into two categories: trend analysis and
what-if analysis. The trend analysis tools, Profile and
Trending and Simple Regression are described in Chapters 5
and 6. The what-if analysis tools, Univariate Modeling,
Multivariate Regression and Business Element Forecasting
are described in Chapters 7, 9, and 10.
o Financial Analysis
Financial analysis is reviewing different financial
alternatives, once you've arrived at a set of
configurations, to find those that provide the best
return to the enterprise.
The CA MICS Capacity Planner can be used to analyze the
data contained in CA MICS Accounting and Chargeback to
assist in the financial analysis phase of capacity
planning.
o Presentation Graphics
Presentation graphics enable you to present the set of
configurations to management for further evaluation and,
after the plan has been implemented, produce regular
reports to compare the actual consumption levels against
the plan.
With MICF access to CA MICS Capacity Planner files, you can
produce high quality graphic reports as part of your
capacity plan and present the results to management. This
is described in Section 1.5.10 and in Chapter 4.
The first two functions, Workload Characterization and
Workload Analysis and Forecasting, require processing vast
quantities of data to identify and track current and new
applications, monitor service and system component
utilization levels, further refine the forecasting process,
and build models of applications. (For further information
see SAR79).
Although you may build models for predicting service and
component utilization levels from small samples of data, you
may have to analyze large quantities of data to ensure that
the samples are representative of the population. The
CA MICS database provides an ideal source for the quantities
of data required for the capacity planning process.
The CA MICS Capacity Planner provides a set of facilities
that use the data in the CA MICS database and other business
element data for capacity planning purposes. These facilities
include: the private and shared capacity planning databases,
analytic functions, and extensions to existing MICF
functions.
Figure 1-1 shows the data process using the facilities of the
CA MICS Capacity Planner.
********************
* Capacity Data * Business Element
* from the CA MICS * Files; such as
* Database * orders and market
******************** forecasts.
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************* Meta Files ___________________________
* Capacity * <------------------------->| |
* Planner * | CA MICS Workstation |
* Database * <--------------------------| Facility (MWF), |
************* Standard Applications | CA MICS Capacity Planner |
/\ Business Element Files | |
| Resource Element Files | |
| | - - - - - - - - - - - - |
| | |
+---------------------------------->| Analysis and Forecasting |
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|___________________________|
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V
Profile and Trending Analysis
Simple Regression Analysis
Univariate Model Forecasting
Multivariate Regression Forecasting
Business Element Forecasting
Worksheet Facility
Presentation Graphics
Figure 1-1. Data Process Through the CA MICS Capacity Planner
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All rights reserved.
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