The ability to anticipate future requirements is an ageless puzzle that has kept civilization on its toes. Every organization wants to address future demands early on, be it a temporary spike in the future or a consistent growth from increased demand. Fortunately, we can now harness historical data and draw intelligible insights from them to give us an idea of what the future could look like. At Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we want to ensure that our customers are also a part of this journey when it comes to planning for their business and its needs.
Organic forecasting and demand planning, new features of OCI Control Center, tackle these scenarios by providing you with valuable data points so that you can develop data driven strategies and stay ahead of the curve.
Organic forecasting and demand planning
Until now, OCI Control Center allowed you to track compute, storage, and other usages for their service. You could go a few months into the past and view your historical consumptions across different resources. Organic forecasting notes these historical data points to predict what your consumption could look like in the coming months. This information is especially useful if the usage starts to breach the threshold and can allow you to make informed decisions for ordering more capacity. Organic forecasting also allows you to pick the time range based on whether you want your consumption to be planned for one month, three months, or the entire year. You can similarly generate forecasts up to a year.
Demand planning is a feature where we allow you to view your historical usages and the forecast for the coming year and then make your own projections that could arise from any inorganic growth that might arise in the future. These data points are collated and represented to you to evaluate the trajectory of your consumption and track them. If you want to plan for a surge in storage or computational usage for a few months, add them to plans with a note so that it’s captured and can be used to analyze if more capacity is required. Demand planning is built to cover all sorts of inorganic usages that you might experience and assist you in forecasting them, along with your organic growth.
View organic forecasts
In the Oracle Cloud Console, navigate to OCI Control Center and select your resource. Select Organic Forecast and enable it. The default time ranges are 30 days of historical data, which is used for forecasting 30 days into the future.
However, you can change how much of historical data you want to be used for forecasting and can also pick when you want the forecast to end (up to a year) by selecting suitable time periods from the menu.
Creating demand plans
To create demand plans, select Demand Planning under OCI Control Center. This page shows a list of plans you created that you could view details of, update, or delete. For creating a forecast, select a resource from the menu and enter any extra usages that you foresee and optionally add a note against it.
After creation, you can view the new forecast with others on the main page. An interesting addition is the ability to mark a demand plan as active. Demand plans marked as active are sent back to OCI and used for tracking consumption and planning for future customer requests.
Check it out!
Organic forecasting and demand planning for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Control Center are a crucial step in enabling our customers to track and manage their resources supported by data. By providing forecasts and plans based off your usages, you can take informed decisions and develop strategies that ensure smooth sailing for your business. We welcome you all to give it a shot and can’t wait to hear from you!