Capacity planning

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This topic will help you work with the Capacity Planning page. This feature of the HPE Consumption Analytics platform gives you the ability to monitor your available capacity, ensuring that you have enough to run your workloads, and alerting you to take action when needed, to prevent a shortage from becoming an outage.

This feature is available to HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity users, and others whose usage data populates the capacity planning fields. It doesn’t apply to public cloud-only accounts.

You can use the Capacity Planning page to track actual and forecast usage against installed capacity, which represents the physical equipment or resources installed (typically the installed capacity is the requested capacity plus a buffer of 10%). Installed capacity can vary on a day-to-day basis, as hardware is brought in and out of service for maintenance purposes.

In addition to the actual usage, you can also view forecast usage based on historical data (see Forecasting usage).

Selecting an account

This only applies if you have access to more than one account. Else you can skip to Viewing results.

To select an account

Click the Account dropdown
The list of available accounts is displayed.
Click the name of the desired account.
The chart(s) and table(s) update to display the corresponding account's results.

Viewing results

By default, capacity planning results in the HPE Consumption Analytics platform are grouped by Service Category and Capacity Units, so that each result aggregates amounts of a single thing, such as gigabytes of storage, to provide the highest level view across the results. There will be a chart and a table for each unique combination of Service Category and Capacity Units. You can refine the results further if needed (see Grouping results).

Viewing daily results

The line chart displays each day's actual/forecasted usage and installed capacity details for detailed inspection.

To view daily values

Hover the mouse pointer in the area with the solid line in the chart (it does not need to be precisely on the line).
The actual usage and installed capacity display for the corresponding day.
Hover the mouse pointer in the area with the dotted line in the chart (again, it does not need to be precisely on the line).
The forecasted usage and installed capacity display for the corresponding day.

Viewing monthly results

The table below each line chart shows the monthly average for the actual/forecasted usage and installed capacity, and indicates whether a value has increased or decreased from one month to the next.

Viewing committed and requested capacities

For HPE GreenLake accounts, your requested and committed capacities are sometimes displayed in both the charts and tables, to help you manage capacity against these contractual values as well as against physical installed capacity. Whether or not these data points are displayed is governed by grouping (see Grouping results).

In the following example, both data points are displayed:

Forecasting usage

You can forecast usage for a specified future timeframe, based on historical values from a selected period, using one of three forecasting methods to infer the future values:

Simple Moving Average - the sum of the data points over a given period, divided by the number of periods
Weighted Moving Average - a heavier weighting is assigned to more current data points
Linear Regression - uses an algorithm to fit a line to the historical values and extrapolate it into the future.

To forecast usage

Click the Forecast Method dropdown.
A list of available forecasting methods displays.
Select the desired forecasting method.
The chart(s) and table(s) update accordingly.
Click the Base Forecast On dropdown.
A list of historical timeframes displays.
Select the time period on which to base your forecast.
The chart(s) and table(s) update accordingly.
Click the Forecast Period dropdown.
A list of future timeframes displays.
Select the time period for which to forecast.
The chart(s) and table(s) update accordingly.

Grouping results

As explained above, Capacity Planning results are always grouped by Service Category and Capacity Units, You can refine this to a more granular view by further grouping the results based on selected fields, to do capacity planning at the level that’s right for you. This will create a chart and table for each unique combination of values for the grouping fields.

To group results by field(s)

Click the Manage Groups link on the left side of the page.
The Manage Groups dialog will display.
Check the desired field or fields in the Select fields pane at left (you can use the Search option to narrow the list of fields to choose from).
The selected fields will display in the Set grouping order pane at right. The top field represents the first level at which the results will be grouped. Each field that follows is a sub-group within the group above it.
You can drag and drop the fields in the Set grouping order pane if you want to change their order.
Click Save to apply the grouped fields.
Once saved, a visualization and table pair per unique combination of grouping values is displayed, with the first one expanded. As before, capacity planning values are displayed at daily granularity in the chart; monthly averaged values are displayed in the table.

In the example above, you may notice that Requested Capacity and Committed Capacity no longer appear in the results. That’s because these values are assigned per meter, a line item on your bill, and don’t exist for a specific tier on a specific storage array. Requested Capacity and Committed Capacity are only visible in the default grouping, in which these numbers are summed for all meters, or when you group by Meter ID or Meter Name.