Capacity Planning Checklist
Quarterly capacity planning workflow for IT operations and infrastructure teams. Covers inventory of current compute, storage, and network resources, growth forecasting, scaling thresholds, risk mitigation, and stakeholder sign-off.
Current Resource Assessment
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Pull asset inventory from RMM and CMDB
Export the current device, VM, and SaaS inventory from your RMM (NinjaOne, Datto, ConnectWise Automate) and CMDB (ServiceNow, Hudu, IT Glue). Reconcile against vCenter, Intune, and cloud provider inventories — orphaned VMs and decommissioned hosts still showing as active are the most common discrepancy.
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Pull 90-day utilization from monitoring
Export CPU, memory, storage, and network utilization metrics from PRTG, LogicMonitor, Datadog, or Auvik over a rolling 90-day window. Capture p50, p95, and peak — averages hide saturation events.
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Identify saturated and underutilized hosts
Flag any host running above 80% sustained CPU or memory, or above 75% datastore consumption. Also flag VMs idling below 5% — right-sizing reclaims capacity before purchase requests get approved.
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Review SAN and backup repository headroom
Check Veeam, Datto, or Rubrik repository fill rates and projected exhaustion dates. Backup storage runs out faster than primary because of retention growth — a common gotcha when restore tests fail because the repo started skipping jobs.
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Document the current-state baseline
Publish the baseline to IT Glue, Hudu, or Confluence with a date stamp. This becomes the trend anchor for the next quarterly review.
Forecasting Future Demand
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Trend 12-month growth from historical metrics
Run linear and seasonal projections against the last 12 months of utilization. Include user-count growth, mailbox growth, and storage consumption rates. Tools like LogicMonitor and Datadog forecast natively; otherwise pull to a spreadsheet.
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Interview business units on upcoming initiatives
Talk to product, finance, and ops leadership about hiring plans, M&A activity, new product launches, and any pending data-residency commitments. Headcount-driven endpoint and license forecasts are usually 70% of the next quarter's spend.
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Flag pending platform or vendor changes
List Windows Server EOL, VMware/Broadcom licensing changes, M365 license SKU shifts, and any planned cloud-region migrations. These reset the capacity baseline and frequently invalidate prior forecasts.
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Build best, expected, and worst-case scenarios
Model three demand trajectories with explicit assumptions (headcount, retention, M&A). Each scenario should produce a CPU, memory, storage, and license-count projection at 6 and 12 months out.
Collects list Collects file Collects paragraph
Capacity Plan and Thresholds
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Draft the quarterly capacity plan
Tie each forecast line to a budget code and a named owner. Reference the IT operating budget and any approved capex carryover. Tag items needing CAB review separately from standard adds.
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Set scaling thresholds in the monitoring platform
Configure warning and critical thresholds for CPU, memory, datastore, and bandwidth in PRTG, Datadog, or LogicMonitor. Common pattern: warn at 70%, critical at 85%, with auto-ticket creation in the PSA at critical.
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Plan expansion procurement and lead times
Required only when forecasting flagged expansion or refresh. Confirm Dell, HPE, and Cisco lead times — current cycles run 8-16 weeks for enterprise gear. For cloud, confirm reserved-instance commitments before quarter-end pricing locks.
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Document scale-up and scale-down runbooks
For each scaling action, write the steps: who triggers, what change request is needed, what rollback looks like. Auto-scaling groups in AWS, AKS node pools, and VMware DRS each need their own playbook.
Risk and Continuity
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Verify RPO and RTO against current capacity
Confirm backup windows still complete inside SLA and that DR-site capacity can host failover workloads. RTO drift is invisible until you actually fail over — verify against the published business RPO/RTO targets.
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Confirm 3-2-1 immutable backup posture
Verify three copies, two media types, one offsite — with at least one immutable (object lock, hardened Linux repo, or air-gapped). Capacity plans that grow primary storage often forget to grow the immutable copy alongside.
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Review license true-up exposure
Reconcile Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle license counts against forecasted growth. Vendor audits surface six-figure true-ups when capacity grows ahead of license entitlement — Broadcom's VMware bundles especially.
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Schedule the next DR failover drill
Book the next quarterly drill on the calendar with named participants. Capacity decisions made this quarter should be validated by the next drill — that's the closing of the loop.
Approval and Communication
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Present the plan at CAB and capture decision
Walk through scenarios, threshold changes, and procurement asks at the change advisory board. Capture approver names and any conditions attached to approval.
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Revise the plan per CAB feedback
Address every condition or open question raised by the board, then resubmit. Keep the revision log inline so the audit trail is intact.
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Publish the plan to the documentation system
Post the approved plan to IT Glue, Hudu, or Confluence in the standard capacity-planning folder. Link it from the CMDB so future ticket triage can reference it.
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Brief stakeholders and the helpdesk team
Send the summary to business-unit leads, the vCIO, and the service desk. Tier 1 needs the new thresholds so they don't escalate noise; business leads need the procurement timeline so they don't promise their teams capacity that isn't ordered yet.
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