About Capacity Planner

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This product is subject to the "Pre-GA Offerings Terms" in the General Service Terms section of the Service Specific Terms. Pre-GA products are available "as is" and might have limited support. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.

This document gives an overview of Capacity Planner.

Capacity Planner gives you visibility into the consumption and quotas for the following Compute Engine resources in a single project or in all the projects within an organization:

• The virtual machine (VM) instances, including the vCPUs, RAM, and Local SSD disks attached to your VMs.

• The persistent disks, whether they're attached to VMs or not.

Capacity Planner also creates forecasts that predict future usage of your project or organization's VMs and persistent disks to help you plan for future capacity needs.

Important: If you can't access Capacity Planner in the Google Cloud console, your project or organization might not be eligible to access and use Capacity Planner. To enable your project or organization to use Capacity Planner, contact your Technical Account Manager or the Sales team.

When to use Capacity Planner

Use Capacity Planner when you want to view the actual and forecasted consumption data of your project or organization's resources. By viewing the actual and forecasted usage data of your resources, you can plan to have sufficient resources and quota for when you need them.

Specifically, you can use Capacity Planner to do the following:

• View the actual and forecasted usage data for the following Compute Engine resources in your project or organization:

  • Your VMs, grouped by machine families and location.

  • Your persistent disks, grouped by persistent disk type and location.

• Secure capacity in advance for future growth or resource consumption periods that don't follow typical growth patterns, such as peak scale events, by generating gcloud CLI commands to create future reservation requests for a single project or shared across multiple projects within an organization.

• Manage quota in a project as follows:

  • View your quota limit and plan when to request a higher quota limit for growths or forecasted spikes in consumption.

  • Enable quota adjuster in your project to allow Google Cloud to proactively submit a quota increase request on your behalf when your project's resource consumption nears a quota limit.

How Capacity Planner works

The following sections outline how Capacity Planner works and calculates usage data and statistical forecasts for the Compute Engine resources in your project or organization.

Usage data

You can view the usage data of the VMs or persistent disks in your project or organization to see their consumption patterns. The usage data in Capacity Planner is a daily percentile usage of your resources. You can apply the following usage percentile to your resources' usage data:

• P50. The P50 usage percentile is the 50th percentile usage data that separates the lower 50% of your resources' usage data from the upper 50%.

• P75. The P75 usage percentile is the 75th percentile usage data that separates the lower 75% of your resources' usage data from the upper 25%.

• P99. The P99 usage percentile is the 99th percentile usage data that separates the lower 99% of your resources' usage data from the upper 1%.

Capacity Planner samples usage data as follows:

• When you view the usage data in a project, Capacity Planner samples the usage data every five minutes and displays the data within 24 hours after usage.

• When you view the usage data in an organization, Capacity Planner samples the usage data of all projects within your organization every five minutes, and aggregates them to a daily usage percentile value. Then, Capacity Planner displays the data within 24 hours after usage.

Usage data is available for up to two years in the past.

Forecasts

You can view the forecast of the VMs or persistent disks in your project or organization to help predict your future capacity needs. The forecast in Capacity Planner is an ensemble of the following:

• A linear and superlinear model.

• If your project or organization has usage data for at least two years, the yearly seasonality effects.

The forecast provides an estimate of future usage based on historical usage patterns for a specified period of time. You can apply the following prediction intervals to the forecast:

• P25-P75. The P25-P75 interval is a prediction interval of 50%, which means that there is a 50% probability that actual future usage will fall within the lower bound and upper bound forecast.

• P05-P95. The P05-P95 interval is a prediction interval of 90%, which means that there is a 90% probability that actual future usage will fall within the lower bound and upper bound forecast.

The statistical forecast is estimated for up to six months in the future.

What's next

• Learn how to view usage and forecast data in Capacity Planner.