Capacity Planning

Purpose

Analyze current resource utilization, quota consumption, and growth trends to predict capacity risks and recommend scaling actions before limits are hit.

Procedure

Step 1: Quota utilization

az vm list-usage --location <region> -o table
az network list-usages --location <region> -o table

Check vCPU quotas (total and per-family), public IPs, load balancers, network interfaces, storage accounts per subscription, App Service plans per region, and AKS clusters. Flag resources > 70% utilized.

Step 2: Compute capacity

1. VM utilization (last 14 days): average and P95 CPU/memory. Flag VMs > 80%.
2. App Service plans:

   az appservice plan list --query "[].{name:name, sku:sku.name, workers:numberOfWorkers}" -o table
   

3. AKS clusters:

   az aks list --query "[].{name:name, nodeCount:agentPoolProfiles[0].count, maxCount:agentPoolProfiles[0].maxCount}" -o table
   

Step 3: Data layer capacity

Check SQL Database DTU/vCore utilization, Cosmos DB RU consumption and 429 rates, Redis Cache memory and server load, storage account transaction rates.

Step 4: Networking capacity

Check ExpressRoute/VPN Gateway bandwidth, Application Gateway/Front Door connections, NAT Gateway SNAT utilization.

Step 5: Growth projection

Apply linear projection to estimate when each resource hits 80% and 100%. If the user specified a growth factor, multiply current usage and check against limits.

Step 6: Quota increase requests

az rest --method patch \
  --url "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/<sub-id>/providers/Microsoft.Capacity/resourceProviders/Microsoft.Compute/locations/<region>/serviceLimits/<family>?api-version=2020-10-25" \
  --body '{"properties":{"limit":{"limitObjectType":"LimitValue","value":<new-limit>}}}'

Scoring

Sample output

References

• Quotas Overview: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/quotas/quotas-overview
• VM Sizes: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/sizes/overview
• Autoscale: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/autoscale/autoscale-overview