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Two Words for the Holiday Rush: Adequate Capacity

Scott Hollis

Depending upon your specific industry, the holiday rush can account for 75% – 85% of your total revenue. You cannot be caught unprepared and your systems have to be able to handle the surge in traffic. So how do you make sure your systems are not going to let you down?

Two words, adequate capacity. Capacity is the #1 reason for service degradation or failure.

Start with historical data. What was the load on your systems last year? This will probably give you the best baseline and starting point.

Now estimate how and why that will change this year. Do you have a blockbuster toy? Or are you offering the iPhone 6 at significant discount? Have you launched a massive marketing campaign or is the marketing group planning something new? Whatever it is, understand how that will impact your demand and how long the additional demand can be expected to last. Make sure you provision for it.

Harness the clouds. You certainly do not want to carry excess capacity all year round, just for this one day or a relatively short time period. Reach out for on-demand capacity from a public or private cloud provider. Run synthetic transactions using your APM tools to ensure your infrastructure will not fold under pressure. Use cloud bursting for as long as needed and dial down as you notice decline in demand. As you move your services to and from the cloud, remember, the location of your services should be transparent to the customers.

Unified monitoring tools can manage your services whether they are running on your local infrastructure, on your private cloud or even a third party public cloud. When issues happen (yes – "when" not "if") you can quickly identify the root cause and get a rapid resolution, hopefully well before the customer is impacted.

You want your customers to be able to access your site and more importantly, you want them to be able transact business while they are there. Make it easy for them and less of a headache for you and your organization.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

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Two Words for the Holiday Rush: Adequate Capacity

Scott Hollis

Depending upon your specific industry, the holiday rush can account for 75% – 85% of your total revenue. You cannot be caught unprepared and your systems have to be able to handle the surge in traffic. So how do you make sure your systems are not going to let you down?

Two words, adequate capacity. Capacity is the #1 reason for service degradation or failure.

Start with historical data. What was the load on your systems last year? This will probably give you the best baseline and starting point.

Now estimate how and why that will change this year. Do you have a blockbuster toy? Or are you offering the iPhone 6 at significant discount? Have you launched a massive marketing campaign or is the marketing group planning something new? Whatever it is, understand how that will impact your demand and how long the additional demand can be expected to last. Make sure you provision for it.

Harness the clouds. You certainly do not want to carry excess capacity all year round, just for this one day or a relatively short time period. Reach out for on-demand capacity from a public or private cloud provider. Run synthetic transactions using your APM tools to ensure your infrastructure will not fold under pressure. Use cloud bursting for as long as needed and dial down as you notice decline in demand. As you move your services to and from the cloud, remember, the location of your services should be transparent to the customers.

Unified monitoring tools can manage your services whether they are running on your local infrastructure, on your private cloud or even a third party public cloud. When issues happen (yes – "when" not "if") you can quickly identify the root cause and get a rapid resolution, hopefully well before the customer is impacted.

You want your customers to be able to access your site and more importantly, you want them to be able transact business while they are there. Make it easy for them and less of a headache for you and your organization.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...