Capacity elements for WAN

[Uniken]

Hi, I need some assistants with finding out what sorts of elements you should monitor for capacity planning.

I have implemented ITIL v3 Capacity and Availability for Application Operation and Platform Operation but my company is still missing WAN and LAN component.

The company I work for is a international company and has WAN connections to all countries, but we only have 25 locations that are important and will only implement the process for those locations. We also have 3 Data Centers located all over the world.

I am stuck at the moment with witch elements that should be monitored for wan, throughput and bandwidth are 2 elements. But as I see it there should be more elements you can monitor on a WAN.

[Cking]

On the wire - Latency
Are you / can you capture device specifics - Router/Switch CPU and memory use.
Are you including Physical capacity of local environments? - Port count

Faults, errors, failover/alerts could also affect capacity and throughput.

Do you want to get down to the level of What is eating your bandwidth?
e-mail, internet, ...?

Uptime of devices - If your Application Availability metrics take a dive, you should be able to correlate - or disassociate that with Network availability.

Talk to your LAN/WAN guys, I'm sure they'll have more.

[Timo]

What is important for you to monitor regarding WAN? Monitoring for the sake of monitoring won't make a difference unless you have a specific reason for capturing certain type of data and then doing something with it (presumably analyzing with the goal of improving).

As you say, there are plenty of elements to be monitored and you can spend a great deal of time setting up monitoring and capturing and storing all the data, but you need to be able to answer the question "why" you are doing this and what purpose does this data serve. Ask yourself what services or aspects of operations depend on WAN, how they are affected if WAN is slow, not available, etc... that may start giving you clues as two what's important to capture.

[Diarmid]

Timo is correct. You need to have purpose and context . You need to be clear what capacities you want to control, then you can work out what components deliver those capacities and begin to see how to measure their performance relevantly.

Capacity planning is not for amateurs. What sort of training/learning have you done? From your question, I suspect, not enough yet. There are enormous benefits to be had from good capacity management; there is much waste that can be achieved from doing it without good understanding.

Google "capacity management" and find rich resources to help you understand what it is all about. There is some useful material at Metron's site, and probably at BMC as well.
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