3 Easy Ways to Use Capacity Planning in Nagios XI

Monitoring current system performance is critical to keeping things running smoothly in your IT infrastructure, but why not also make use of all the historical performance data you collect to create projections of future usage? With Nagios XI’s Capacity Planning capability, one of the most popular Enterprise Edition features, you’ll be able to visualize and alert on the usage of tomorrow, today!

1. Using the Report

To access the report, navigate to the Reports menu, then select Capacity Planning. Next, select the Period (how far into the future you want to project), and select the specific Host, Hostgroup, or Servicegroup to graph the results for.

Once you make all of your customization selections, you can then save, email, export, and even (another great Enterprise Edition feature) schedule the report for automatic delivery at set times.

Alternately, you can navigate to the Status Detail page for a service and go to the Capacity Planning tab to view projections.

The options tabs to the right of the initial graph provide access to a data Summary, all of the individual data points, and the option to customize your Time Period and Extrapolation Method.

2. Adding Graphs to Dashboards

You’ll notice the Dashify icon on the upper left of each Capacity Planning graph, which you can click to easily add them to your Dashboards. This provides an easy way to quickly access at-a-glance projections for key services in your environment and to roll them into other Dashboards you’ve created.

3. Using the Wizard

It’s even possible to set up alerts on projections using the Capacity Planning Wizard, found in the Configure > Configuration Wizards menu. In Step 1 you’ll choose which service to monitor. Then in Step 2 you’ll choose how far ahead the check should look, what algorithm it should use, the projected value at which you want to be alerted, and how many days in advance of the resource hitting the custom value you wish to be alerted.

You can choose to either add the newly created services to the host under which the services producing the performance data reside or check the “Put all new services on a specific host” checkbox to assign them elsewhere (for example, to a dummy host reserved just for capacity planning checks).

You can click the Render Graph link at the bottom of the wizard to see a graph of current and projected data and to see where your Custom Value selection falls within it.

Once the checks are created, you can monitor them like any other service or even roll them into your Business Process Intelligence groups:

Resources

For a more detailed overview of using Capacity Planning, take a look at this guide:

How to Use Capacity Planning in Nagios XI

If you’d like a tour of all of the Enterprise Edition features, this article provides a comprehensive overview:

10 Great Features of the Nagios XI Enterprise Edition

If you’d like to try Capacity Planning out for yourself, we offer a free trial version you can take for a spin:

Nagios XI Free Trial Download

We’d also be happy to offer you a custom Demo session if want a guided tour of our solutions, or a free Quickstart remote session with a sales engineer to help you get a few things set up. You can email [email protected] for details on setting up either option.