Performance monitoring and capacity planning

Performance monitoring and capacity planning are
infamous subjects to managers of mainframe-based data centers. In
brief, an Information Technology manager must decide how much computing
resources an organization needs, when they are needed, and answer why
the "how much" estimation always changes.

Managers of distributed, client/server environments wrestle with
this problem too. But they must endure the added complexity of dealing
with multiple sites.

In supporting the functions of capacity planning and performance
monitoring, IT organizations are really assessing the service levels they provide, which are decided by customer expectations:

• What service will IT provide?
  
  The customers define this.
  
  
  
  
• What service can a given configuration provide?
  
  Provided by the IT organization, these are the goals for user performance,
  factoring in the budgetary restrictions.
  

As those associated with the mainframe data centers know, this is not
easy, and even old-hands guess wrong. The difficulties arise from
several reasons:

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