What is Capacity Planning in a bird's eye view?

Though the awareness about the Performance Engineering is slowly increasing, still people are thinking that Capacity planning as an alternative to performance testing or sometimes planning for the server capacities before baselining the software performance.

Capacity Planning helps in identifying the specific point of time in future through prediction when the system saturation is going to occur and provides the most cost-effective way of delaying system saturation as long as possible.

Capacity Planners help in identifying the system's saturation point. When and why the saturation would occur and which are the best cost-effective alternatives for avoiding the saturation.

Before looking at the underlying server hardware, we need to first look at the software performance and perform tuning activities to get better performance. Then we need to think about the server capacities.End of the day, its the server's workload pattern which consumes the system resources. Identify the system workload and analyze the system resource usage for the typical workload expected on the server. Based on this, arrive at the capacity baseline on the current server hardware.

Based on the business forecasts, do a prediction on how much increase would be expected in the workload due to the business forecast and identify the required server resources to support the demand. Thus Capacity Forecast is done for the forecasted load expected by the business.