Viewing capacity planning information
The Capacity Planning Summary card gives you a quick visual indication of usage and estimates when a meter, representing physical equipment or resources, will run out of capacity. This helps ensure that you have enough to run your workloads, and alerts you to take action when needed, to prevent a shortage from becoming an outage.
You can display the full Capacity Planning report in your HPE GreenLake Central dashboard. You can filter by the account displayed (if you have access to more than one), and by service. You can also group by available options by service, and change the past and future date ranges for forecasting.
Meter capacity is calculated based on actual usage against installed capacity (typically 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.
Please note the following with respect to capacity planning in HPE GreenLake Capacity Planning:
- Capacity planning only applies to HPE services, not to public cloud services.
- The actual usage in the capacity planning chart is based on the billed usage, not the actual physical resource usage. Actual usage may exceed the installed capacity if the physical hardware resource consumption is less than the allocation, due to hypervisor and storage optimization technologies.
- Enhancements to the chart for aaS capacity planning are in process. Meantime you can enter a value in Installed Capacity for VMaaS and other standard services in the Manage Rates page, for the purpose of showing capacity planning for these services.
- Azure Stack Services are consumption-based, not allocation-based. Capacity planning is not applicable to this service.
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Azure Stack Compute is similar to other HPE GreenLake core services; HPE Consumption Analytics gets both Installed Capacity and Actual Usage, and supports capacity planning against this hardware.
Understanding the summary chart
The chart displayed on your capacity planning summary card may vary depending on the account(s) in your tenant, and/or on your permissions.
In tenants having only one account with meters that support capacity planning, the card shows them in a stacked bar chart, in descending order by percentage of installed capacity used:
In tenants having multiple accounts with meters that support capacity planning, the card shows a table:
The table has a row for each billing account, and a column for each status (these are further explained in the next section, Understanding the Trend view). The numbers in a row indicate the number of services in each status:
- High Usage means actual usage is above Requested Capacity.
- Low Usage means actual usage is below Reserved Capacity
- Optimal means actual usage is between Reserved and Requested Capacity
Meters for which usage is decreasing are hidden.
Choosing account display settings
Your permissions govern which accounts you can view in the Capacity Planning Summary card.
If you have access to both trial and subscription billing accounts, you can click the Settings icon to choose whether to include trial accounts in the Capacity Planning Summary card:
If you have access to only trial or only subscription billing accounts, you will not have the option to change the type of accounts included in the Capacity Planning Summary card.
The three account display options are shown below:
- ONLY subscription billing accounts (default)
- ONLY trial billing accounts - When this option is selected, a warning icon displays next to the settings icon; when you click the icon, the information message below displays:
- BOTH subscription and trial billing accounts - If this option is selected, a warning icon displays next to the settings icon; when you click the icon, the information message below displays:
Navigating to the Capacity Planning report
You can navigate to the full Capacity Planning report in your HPE GreenLake Central dashboard by clicking the Details link in the bottom right hand corner of the card.
In tenants having multiple accounts with meters that support capacity planning, you can also display the report by clicking any row.
HPE GreenLake Capacity Planning automatically saves your page settings and drop-down selections in the Capacity Planning view for each tenant. So you can continue with the most recent view when you return to that tenant, even if you leave the HPE GreenLake Capacity Planning page or switch to a different tenant.
Viewing the Capacity Planning report
The full Capacity Planning report shows more detail, on a per meter basis, for the selected account. Next to each meter name, the percentage of installed capacity used is displayed. The detail for the first meter in the list is expanded by default. You can expand or collapse the detail for any meter, to view the actual usage and anticipated charges for the meter, and compare those to the corresponding requested, installed, and reserved capacities.
Understanding the Capacity Planning charts
The Trend view (default) shows you consumption trends for actual usage and forecast data over a specified period of time. The Single Month view, which you can select from the View pulldown above the trend chart, shows daily usage against installed capacity for a selected month.
The default in both views is to expand the first meter in the results list. You can click the ˄ and ˅ arrows to collapse and expand the meters in the list. Next to the meter name a color-coded icon indicates the actual usage band (see explanation in the Trend view section below), and opposite the meter name a color-coded bar shows the percentage of installed capacity used as of the current date.
Understanding the Trend view
The default chart shows capacity planning show consumption trends for actual usage and forecast data over a period of time based on the forecast filters. The charts will show installed capacity and actual/forecast usage over a period of time, and colored bands may be shown based on contractual values (requested capacity and reserved capacity).
HPE GreenLake Billing Manager uses an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression model with one independent variable (simple regression) to calculate the forecast usage.
Depending on the Group by selection, the charts may show colored bands to indicate where the actual usage falls with regard to the contractual values Requested Capacity and Reserved Capacity. The bands are defined as follows:
- High Usage – Actual Usage is above Requested Capacity
- Optimal Usage – Actual Usage is between Reserved Capacity and Requested Capacity
- Low Usage – Actual Usage is below Reserved Capacity
The bands are stacked from Low usage, at the bottom of the trend chart, to High usage at the top:
In the illustration above, Actual/Forecast Usage is at 100% of Installed Capacity.
You can turn the colored bands off and on by clicking the Usage Category toggle (see more about grouping, filtering, and toggles below). When the toggle is off, only the lines for actual usage and capacity values will be displayed in the chart:
In the illustration above, Actual/Forecast Usage is at 100% of Installed Capacity
The units on the y axis of the charts are based on the configuration in the billing account. The height of the bands is also determined by configuration, since the reserved and requested capacities are input values, and the installed capacity is calculated based on the requested capacity.
In the charts, actual usage is shown as a solid line. When you hover the mouse pointer over a past date, a tooltip shows you installed capacity, actual usage, requested capacity, and reserved capacity for that date:
In the chart, forecast usage is shown as a dotted line. When you hover the mouse pointer over a future date, a tooltip shows you the installed capacity, forecasted usage, requested capacity, and reserved capacity for that date:
If there is not enough installed capacity for a given meter (i.e., its Installed Capacity is lower than its Requested Capacity and Reserved Capacity), the following message will display:
Understanding the Single Month view
The Single Month view, which you can select from the View pulldown in the filters panel, shows daily usage against installed capacity for a selected month, in bar graph format.
See Filtering, grouping, and using toggles for the differences in these options between this view and the Trend view.
Understanding the Capacity Planning table
Regardless of which view you choose, the Capacity Planning page also shows consumption trends for the selected meter in a table, which always shows values by month.
This accounts for small variations in usage values between the tooltip and table, as seen in the actual usage trend chart example shown earlier in Understanding the Trend view.
In the Trend view, the table shows forecast usage values in addition to actual usage values.
For the selected meter, the table shows rows for Usage, Installed Capacity, and Available Capacity, and columns for each month. If the option selected in Group by includes contractual values, the table will also show Requested Capacity and Reserved Capacity for each month.
Where a service is reporting by Tier and Location, the contract values Requested Capacity and Reserved Capacity are shown when services are grouped by Tier, but not when services are grouped by Location, since these contract values don't apply at the location level.
Increases or decreases from the previous month are shown to the left of the actual (or forecast) Usage and Available Capacity values ((in green and red, respectively).
You can scroll to view all selected months, or resize the columns in the table.
Filtering, grouping, and using toggles
The options available above the chart depend on which view you choose.
When you choose the Single Month view:
- There are no forecasting options available
- A Month pulldown is available in addition to the time period pulldown.
Single Month view:
The remaining options, described in the following sections, are the same as in the Trend view.
The filtering, grouping, and display unit options available will depend on your account configuration settings.
Filtering
You can filter by the account displayed (if you have access to more than one), by location, by service, and by time period.
- The filtering options available in the Location and Service pulldowns will depend on your account configuration settings.
Grouping
You can group by available options by service.
This example shows the available grouping options for the SAP HANA 2.0 service:
If you group by a level for which Requested Capacity and Reserved Capacity values don't apply, you'll see the following message:
- If you see this message, select a different option from the Group by pulldown list.
When you change the Group by field, the data for the first group will be shown, with the rest of the groups collapsed.
You can click the ˄ and ˅ arrows to collapse and expand the meters in the list.
Setting the display unit
You can select the desired unit of measure in the Display Unit field:
Setting the toggles
You can turn the colored bands off and on by clicking the Usage Category toggle. Likewise, you can turn the forecast off and on by clicking the Forecast toggle:
Setting forecast options
If you have the Forecast option turned on, you can set the past time period to base the forecast on, and the future time period to forecast:
The previous time period options are 2, 3, or 6 months. The future time period options are 3, 6, or 12 months. HPE GreenLake Capacity Planning will use the selected time periods to create the forecast using the linear regression method.