The capacity management ensures that the service provider has sufficient capacities permanently available in order to meet the current and future agreed business resource needs. In this sense efficiency means that provision is made for a high level of resource capacity utilization.

The aim of capacity management is to proactively avoid resource bottlenecks. The following best practice recommendations have become established practiced for meeting the requirements of capacity management:

• The service provider must understand the current and future requirements from the business perspective and consequently be able to ascertain the future IT requirement on the basis of the strategic business development.
• Derived from the business strategy the demand forecasts and estimates of capacity utilization must be converted into specific requirements for the IT infrastructure and documented. To this end the load response of the corresponding service components for different levels of transaction volumes must be understood from the technical viewpoint.
• The data on current and past component and resource capacity utilization levels should be recorded in transparent form and analyzed for the purpose of forecasting capacities.
• New or modified services must be assessed in terms of the future capacity demand in the various life phases and corresponding preparations made.
• The capacity plan which documents the current performance of the infrastructure and the anticipated requirements must be drawn up to meet the relevant situation, at least however on an annual basis. It should be noted that test and integration environments in particular show a relatively high capacity reserve which is actually rarely utilized.

The purpose of all measures in capacity management is to achieve the agreed service level targets.

For comparison see the  Capacity Management Process accordance with ITIL V3