Capacity Planning
Successful Network Bandwidth Management and Quality of Service via Capacity Monitoring and Capacity Planning
Whether it is traffic originating at the edge or traversing the backbone, network architects need to anticipate the impact on their existing infrastructure, services and equipment to prevent degradations in QoS and ultimately the customer experience. The net effect is that without an adequate capacity planning process in place, they will not be able to foresee issues that will occur. A sound process is essential to establishing a baseline of performance and understanding that even the most subtle changes in traffic growth or patterns can alter network reliability and performance.
Establishing a capacity planning strategy that provides sufficiently detailed information requires data about existing resources and historical performance trends to be regularly collected and maintained in a repository before they can be used in the capacity planning process to:
- Conduct what-if studies to determine whether the existing infrastructure can support new growth or the roll-out of new service plans
- Accurately forecast when capacity may be saturated
- Assess the impact of traffic on individual links or hardware components in the network
- Build a business case for capital expenditures
- Balance the deployment of services across the infrastructure
- Make data-driven decisions based on actual flow metrics
- Ensure the high possible customer satisfaction and QoE
Rather than collect bits of data from different sources in different structures that need to be converted into a useful format before the above results can be achieved, InfoVista Capacity Planning solution exploits the same flow records already being collected for use in real-time troubleshooting and turn them into a strategic capacity planning asset.
Through InfoVista’s innovative Capacity Planning solution, network architects and engineers quickly analyze flow data to establish a normal performance baseline. Once complete, any deviations from the baseline can be identified and understood. Finally, what-if scenarios can be run to gauge the impact of traffic growth or a new service on the existing infrastructure to identify potential areas of concern. The key benefits of InfoVista’s Capacity Planning solution include:
Increased Visibility
- Establish which sources, destinations, devices, customers, applications, protocols, service plans and peering agreements are traffic
- Understand the impact of all traffic on bandwidth, SLAs, QoE and QoS and priority
- Identify the demands of individual devices and the effect of changes on the infrastructure
Improved Service Availability
- Accurately assess the impact of new services and plans on the backbone with service modeling and what-if analysis
- Measure and analyze backbone metrics to establish a baseline and traffic flow patterns
- Prevent performance issues and service degradation through proactive trend analysis
Enhanced Operational Efficiency
- Spend less time gathering data and more time on regular measurement and analysis
- Identify where saturation of specific links or regions could occur as the network is in a constant state of flux and evolution
- Make incremental adjustments to capacity over time to improve resource management
