This document gives an overview of Capacity Planner.
By using Capacity Planner, you can view the current and forecasted usage of the virtual machine (VM) instances and Persistent Disk volumes in your Google Cloud project or organization. Capacity Planner helps you plan for future capacity and quota needs by letting you do the following:
View how your project or organization uses VMs and Persistent Disk volumes. This gives you a high-level overview of your resources' usage.
View Capacity Planner forecasts for VM and Persistent Disk use up to six months in the future. This helps you analyze and optimize your resources' usage.
Reserve resources in advance by helping you create future reservation requests. This helps you prepare for expected growth or periods when your usage doesn't follow typical patterns, such as peak scale events.
Manage your project's quota limits by seeing how close you are to your limit and setting up automatic quota increase requests. This helps you prevent outages when reaching a quota limit, and reduce the need to submit manual quota increase requests.
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 Disk volumes 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 Disk volumes 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.