The biggest lesson I've learned using the solution is to trust this tool, sometimes more than the vendor's own tools. For example, VMware makes recommendations about how many VMs you can fit on a cluster. This tool has been more aggressive in its recommendations. ITRS Capacity Planner says we can fit more VMs on a host if we make our existing VMs a bit smaller than VMware recommends. But when you think about it, VMware is trying to sell licenses for VMware, so it's going to err on the side of caution compared to an impartial tool like ITRS. Upon reflection, this tool has taught me to not necessarily take the word of a vendor directly and to always seek a second opinion. In terms of advice, I would say you should ensure you spend time talking through your use cases with ITRS. Much of the product, such as dashboards and the like, is very customized to your own requirements. However, those dashboards and the information that you can get out of Capacity Planner are, obviously, absolutely key to the success of the solution. So don't be afraid to ask any question of ITRS because, nine times out of 10 they've already heard it and they've done a similar piece of work. And if it's something they haven't thought of before, they're very receptive because it probably is a valid use case. A key example was that when we got the tool, you could only model an increase in demand. You couldn't model a decrease in demand. For me, being able to model a decrease in demand was as simple as doing an increase. I questioned ITRS about this, saying that we have a seasonal business where we're really busy from Christmas Day to the end of January, along with some other specific months throughout the year, but after Christmas we want to bring the size of the estate back down. Why can't we do that in the tool? They turned around and said, "Do you know what? Nobody's ever asked us to be able to do that before. But it makes perfect sense." So their developers spent time and wrote a change to the product that allowed us to model a decrease in demand. That was amazing customer service. It's a managed service, so the vendor does all the hard work. We have one virtual machine that we have to maintain — the data collector — and that's looked after by one of our platform services engineers. The only other overhead for us is ensuring that the script that extracts data from our Grafana instance to the data collector, runs well. Script alterations are done by me and by some of our web services engineers. It's very minimal, in terms of maintenance. It's primarily myself who uses the solution on a daily basis, as capacity manager, and I generate reports out of the tool on a weekly and monthly basis for our senior management team and our board. We've also got some engineers who use the tool for planning purposes. When they're planning a new service or extending service provision, they will use the Forward Thinking scenario modeling, to make sure that that service is correctly specified. I would rate it as close to a nine out of 10. There is some room for improvement, particularly around the reporting, but overall the solution far exceeds my requirements and it has led to real benefits within our company. It definitely deserves a high mark like that.
The biggest lesson I've learned using the solution is to trust this tool, sometimes more than the vendor's own tools. For example, VMware makes recommendations about how many VMs you can fit on a cluster. This tool has been more aggressive in its recommendations. ITRS Capacity Planner says we can fit more VMs on a host if we make our existing VMs a bit smaller than VMware recommends. But when you think about it, VMware is trying to sell licenses for VMware, so it's going to err on the side of caution compared to an impartial tool like ITRS. Upon reflection, this tool has taught me to not necessarily take the word of a vendor directly and to always seek a second opinion. In terms of advice, I would say you should ensure you spend time talking through your use cases with ITRS. Much of the product, such as dashboards and the like, is very customized to your own requirements. However, those dashboards and the information that you can get out of Capacity Planner are, obviously, absolutely key to the success of the solution. So don't be afraid to ask any question of ITRS because, nine times out of 10 they've already heard it and they've done a similar piece of work. And if it's something they haven't thought of before, they're very receptive because it probably is a valid use case. A key example was that when we got the tool, you could only model an increase in demand. You couldn't model a decrease in demand. For me, being able to model a decrease in demand was as simple as doing an increase. I questioned ITRS about this, saying that we have a seasonal business where we're really busy from Christmas Day to the end of January, along with some other specific months throughout the year, but after Christmas we want to bring the size of the estate back down. Why can't we do that in the tool? They turned around and said, "Do you know what? Nobody's ever asked us to be able to do that before. But it makes perfect sense." So their developers spent time and wrote a change to the product that allowed us to model a decrease in demand. That was amazing customer service. It's a managed service, so the vendor does all the hard work. We have one virtual machine that we have to maintain — the data collector — and that's looked after by one of our platform services engineers. The only other overhead for us is ensuring that the script that extracts data from our Grafana instance to the data collector, runs well. Script alterations are done by me and by some of our web services engineers. It's very minimal, in terms of maintenance. It's primarily myself who uses the solution on a daily basis, as capacity manager, and I generate reports out of the tool on a weekly and monthly basis for our senior management team and our board. We've also got some engineers who use the tool for planning purposes. When they're planning a new service or extending service provision, they will use the Forward Thinking scenario modeling, to make sure that that service is correctly specified. I would rate it as close to a nine out of 10. There is some room for improvement, particularly around the reporting, but overall the solution far exceeds my requirements and it has led to real benefits within our company. It definitely deserves a high mark like that.