What's new in Capacity Planner

AWS summary dashboard

The AWS visual summary dashboard displays key information about the AWS state.

When you log in to Capacity Planner, you can immediately see the total AWS spend in the last full calendar month, the recommendations on how you can save money by turning off idle instances, for right-sizing or removing EBS volumes.

Monthly costs chart displays your month by month breakdown of spend across AWS as well as the estimated spend and the predicted spend for the following month.

In the Services Costs chart you can see a breakdown of cost by the services that you are using.

This dashboard can be enabled if you are using an AWS solution.

New user interface

The new Capacity Planner user interface is based around React and amCharts, and it brings a fresh look to Capacity Planner and more consistency with the ITRS new Observability Platform, Obcerv.

Standard lists are now used throughout, with a choice of number of rows to display, pagination, and sorting options as well as easier access to Baseline Views, Scenarios and Reports.

Reporting enhancements

This release comes with a new report framework with improved presentation of saved reports and report templates.

The report page now distinguishes more clearly between Reports which can be run immediately to produce output, and Report Templates which require parameters to be set before they can be run. Brief descriptions of each report are now available along with a link to the documentation pages for more information.

Reports that you have created from a template and saved now appear in the Reports section. This section also includes any reports created by other users that have been shared, and standard reports.

Cloud cost optimisation

Capacity Planner has a number of capabilities and features that allow you to analyse the costs of your cloud environment and see recommendations for their optimization. This is achieved through right-sizing, right-buying, or looking at the recommended savings plans.

New visualisations are also available that help you analyse your data and understand where the recommendations are coming from.

Automatic recommendations based on baseline analysis

Based on baseline analysis, Capacity Planner provides automatic recommendations for improvements in the configuration of machines currently active in your IT estate. This includes right-sizing recommendations, target vCPU configurations, hardware deployment in clusters, storage reduction and suggestions for machines that should be disabled.

This is fully configurable allowing you to set up activity threshold settings and minimum configuration for right-sizing.

Cloud migration recommendations

Capacity Planner automatically suggests cloud instance configurations in AWS scoped to a baseline view, taking optimal capacity configuration into consideration in order to effectively reduce costs. It looks at all the active machines that are currently visible in your sunburst view and determines the closest and cheapest match for each virtual machine. Depending on your use case, you can change the recommendation rules.

Right-sizing operations

The right-sizing operations in Forward Thinking provide more flexibility to specify a minimum number of vCPUs to be used in the operation and the minimum allowable memory configuration. You can also configure the buffer used when ensuring a level of headroom is available after right-sizing.