Storage capacity planning with PRTG

The most commonly used formula for storage capacity planning is:

Future capacity needs = Current storage consumption × (1+ expected growth rate)n + Buffer

where "n" is the number of years in the future you’re planning for.

First, take stock of your current storage consumption. How many storage devices do you have? How much disk space have you used up? And are there any bottlenecks, or apps or teams that use disproportionately more storage space than others?

Second, use this historical data to assess how much your storage requirements might grow. Factor in new projects, any plans to expand into new markets, and infrastructure changes such as new apps you might deploy and other developments that might affect the amount of data you’ll need to store.

Third, add a buffer, just in case your storage requirements turn out to be higher than expected or there are other issues, such as delays procuring the additional storage infrastructure. The buffer depends on what you’re going to store. If the data is business-critical, it’s a good idea to have a higher buffer, perhaps 20% or 30%. For less critical data, 5% or 10% might be enough.

Well. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the capacity data you have at your disposal is make or break when you're working out future capacity needs. The more historical data you have (and the more accurate it is), the more accurate your predictions will be. But if you don't have much data, or it's hard to use because it's spread all over the place, you better add a very big buffer (which will drive up the budget and displease Colin from accounts).

PRTG's all-in-one network monitoring tool has sophisticated preconfigured sensors that can track the key metrics of every storage device on your network in real time. More importantly, once you start monitoring your storage, you can keep the data for as long as you need, giving you unparalleled visibility into your current storage requirements… and what your future needs might look like.

In PRTG, “sensors” are the basic monitoring elements. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, for example the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, or the free space on a disk drive.

On average, you need about 5-10 sensors per device or one sensor per switch port.