Available now: Capacity planning for OCI Compute instances

We are excited to announce Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Operations Insights host capacity planning now supports OCI Compute instances. This provides you with a holistic view of all OCI Compute instances across Oracle Cloud to help optimize Compute capacity based on proactive planning with capacity forecasting based on historical trends of business and infrastructure metrics.

Why capacity planning?

Providing sufficient resources is a cloud provider’s responsibility. However, as service owners in a cloud-scale environment, we still need to ensure that our application stack doesn’t hit scalability limits. Managing scalability limits and efficiently using computing resources on the application level is still highly relevant, even on cloud infrastructure.

Overprovisioning all resources instead of keeping an eye on capacity is highly inefficient. Because infrastructure cost is not zero yet, customers will find underutilized infrastructure quickly consuming the business margin and running out of capacity when application usage suddenly surges.

Customers can now use Operations Insights host capacity planning functionality to analyze the behavior of OCI Compute instances under load and generate insights and recommendations based on trends, correlation, dependencies, and saturation of constraints.

With the introduction of host capacity planning for OCI Compute instances, you can now analyze the resource utilization of these systems, and thereby identify the capacity requirements and perform capacity optimization using the built-in forecasting capabilities and model future capacity needs.

Enabling OCI Compute instances for capacity planning can be done from the Operations Insights administration page for hosts and choosing the telemetry type as Cloud Infrastructure. You can use the compartment selector to choose the compartments where your Compute instances reside. Your OCI Compute instances are automatically listed for you to choose and enable capacity planning on the hosts of your interest.

 

Figure 1:  Enable Host Capacity Planning for OCI Compute instances from Operations Insights      

Use cases

Forecast resource requirements

By using the Operations Insights host capacity planning functionality for OCI Compute instances, you can perform the following analyses:

  • Enterprise-wide analysis of resource utilization, capacity planning for OCI Compute instances
  • Improve resource utilization by identifying under and over-utilized resources
  • Identify systems projected to reach high utilization and deal with spikes in demand that are impossible to plan for ahead of time
  • Identify total lead time to expand capacity forecast (via machine learning) based on long-term historic data to project future resource growth
  • Track and avoid overspending due to excessive resource usage 

 

Figure 2:  Capacity Planning for OCI Compute instances Fleet view      

You can drill down to individual OCI Compute instances and look at performance characteristics to analyze:

  • Top hosts by the resource type CPU and memory
  • The trend of resource utilization of your server targets, and forecast values for a specific time period.
  • Top server targets by a specific attribute. For example, you can group targets by operating system, or utilization level
  • Find low resource utilization servers
  • Top processes trend based on physical memory usage
  • Plan ahead using performance history and seasonality
  • Ensure service levels can be met over time

 

Figure 3:  Exadata System Details with photorealistic view     

 

Conclusion

Operations Insights integrates with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute instances and simplifies onboarding for existing customers using automated collection of data and advanced analytics for capacity planning. Operations Insights provides 360-degree insight into the resource utilization and capacity of databases and hosts. You can easily analyze CPU and memory resources, forecast capacity issues, and proactively identify and optimize Compute capacity based on historical trends of business & infrastructure metrics.

Try Livelabs for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Operations Insights!  For more information about this feature and how you can use it, see the documentation.