Resolving capacity risk and efficiency issues by using recommendations

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization provides a set of out-of-the-box recommendations that helps you to prevent and resolve a probable risk or efficiency issue with the capacity of your infrastructure resources.

With recommendations, you can obtain answers to some of the critical questions related to your environment, such as:

  • Are there any idle or unused VMs in the infrastructure?  
  • Are there any oversubscribed vSphere clusters in the virtualized environment? If so, what action should be taken to offload some of these oversubscribed clusters?
  • Is there sufficient CPU, memory, and storage for vSphere clusters for the next 30 days?
  • How much storage is consumed by old snapshots? Can some of these snapshots be deleted to retrieve storage?
  • Is there sufficient storage in datastores for the next 30 days? How can capacity problems in datastores be addressed?

Related topics

Analyzing-your-infrastructure-data-by-using-capacity-views

Predicting-and-preventing-potential-issues

About recommendations

A recommendation is a suggestion based on best practices about how to avoid potential capacity risks or improve efficiency. Out-of-the-box recommendations are available for the following technologies or platform entities:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Kubernetes
  • VMware vSphere

Recommendations for a technology automatically start getting generated after you install the capacity view for that technology or after you install Cloud Migration Simulation.

Each recommendation comprises the following elements:

  • A brief overview of the issue. 
  • One or more suggested actions to resolve the issue. By performing the recommended actions, you can avoid the potential capacity risks, improve the overall efficiency, and reduce costs.

 Recommendations are grouped as follows: Risk recommendations and Efficiency recommendations.

  • Risk recommendations are provided to prevent a risk. For example, in case a disk is nearing saturation; the recommendation provides information about how much space must be added to prevent saturation for the next three months. 
  • Efficiency recommendations are not to prevent a problem, but to improve resource usage by eliminating wastage and reducing associated costs. For example, most of the old snapshots consume resources to save images that are not used since a long time. The recommendation provides information about how much savings can you achieve by deleting these snapshots to save resources and improve the data center efficiency. 

If Migration Simulation is installed, the Efficiency recommendations for cloud technologies also provide the estimated cost savings (in $) that you can achieve by performing the recommended actions. The cost savings are computed based on the catalog costs from cloud vendors. 

You can configure a recommendation as per your requirement by modifying the condition in the corresponding Optimizer rule. 

A user with administrative privileges can reconfigure or add new Optimizer rules to modify the recommendations. For more information, see Configuring-and-managing-Optimizer-rules. 

Recommendation types

The following types of recommendations are available:

Supported recommendation types per platform entity

The following table provides a quick view of the supported recommendation types per entity. For detailed information about a recommendation type, see the earlier section.


For example, the following recommendations are displayed for vSphere views:

Recom_example_vSphere.png

To access recommendations

You can access recommendations on the capacity view pages of the corresponding platform.

Platform

Page in the Views tab

AWS

GCP

Azure

Kubernetes

vSphere

 

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