Now that you know how the CloudHealth Platform will help you ensure consistency and optimization within your environment with it let’s discuss how it can help you with two necessary evils; capacity planning and budget management.
Simplify Capacity Planning
When I talk to customers from various industries and sizes, one common theme that they talk about is capacity planning. Capacity planning is defined as “The process of determining the amount of capacity required to produce in the future” 2. In other words, it helps you understand whether you have enough IT resources to complete a task/ project. For the IT engineers this is very important since they want to enable other teams to finish their task on schedule. Capacity planning gets even more critical when engineering teams want to change the architecture or update the underlying technology.
The CloudHealth Platform provides you reports through which you can identify how resource consumption and utilization is growing or shrinking. These reports help you gauge not only how you are consuming resources, but also forecast your resource requirements over a period of time. This is very important before you start a new project that can make or break your business strategy. For example, the report below shows how the resources are consumed on a weekly basis by function. Using these reports you can align your resources better with the functions and manage your critical resource consumption.
Track your expenses accurately by project
Every company strives to create more realistic budgets and compare expenses against it. Most organizations use excel files or other homegrown tools to track costs by project. These can be inaccurate, time consuming, and error prone. This defeats the entire purpose of creating budgets.
With the CloudHealth platform you can track your engineering expenses with dashboards or reports. You can enter your budget information for the year or even how you expect the budget to grow/ shrink month-over-month. On a real time basis you can then compare how your resource consumption is performing. This information can be used for chargeback/ showback purposes. Or you can create simplified dashboards for the VP of Engineering, CIO or CTO with information that they are most interested in. You can use this information to encourage gamification and promote desired behavior within your organization. This will help keep the expenses within budget through positive reinforcement. Look at the image below for a sample CIO report.
2 Source: https://scm.ncsu.edu/scm-articles/scm-terms
