Capacity Management as a Service for Enterprise Standard Software

Capacity management approaches optimize component utilization from a strong technical perspective. In fact, the quality of involved services is considered implicitly by linking it to resource capacity values. This practice hinders to evaluate design alternatives with respect to given service levels that are expressed in user-centric metrics such as the mean response time for a business transaction. We argue that utilized historical workload traces often contain a variety of performance-related information that allows for the integration of performance prediction techniques through machine learning. Since enterprise applications excessively make use of standard software that is shipped by large software vendors to a wide range of customers, standardized prediction models can be trained and provisioned as part of a capacity management service which we propose in this article. Therefore, we integrate knowledge discovery activities into well-known capacity planning steps, which we adapt to the special characteristics of enterprise applications. Using a real-world example, we demonstrate how prediction models that were trained on a large scale of monitoring data enable cost-efficient measurement-based prediction techniques to be used in early design and redesign phases of planned or running applications. Finally, based on the trained model, we demonstrate how to simulate and analyze future workload scenarios. Using a Pareto approach, we were able to identify cost-effective design alternatives for an enterprise application whose capacity is being managed.