Capacity Planner overview

Preview

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.

You can use Capacity Planner to view the current and forecasted usage of the following resources in your Google Cloud project, folder, or organization:

• Compute Engine instances

• Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk volumes

• GPUs

• TPUs

Use cases

Capacity Planner helps you plan for future capacity and quota needs by letting you do the following:

• View data that helps you predict the future requirements for resources and allocation quotas across your project, folder, or organization. This data includes the following:

  • Historical usage, forecasted usage, and quota availability for your compute instances, Persistent Disk volumes, Hyperdisk volumes, GPUs, and TPUs.

  • Current on-demand reservations, as well as past and current future reservation requests, for your instances and GPUs.

• Act on data to prevent issues with obtaining resources. These actions include the following:

  • Request resources in advance to prepare for expected or unexpected growth.

  • Set up automatic quota increase requests when your quota nears a limit to do the following:

    • Prevent outages when you reach a quota.

    • Reduce the need to submit manual quota increase requests.

How Capacity Planner works

The following sections outline how Capacity Planner calculates and displays usage data and statistical forecasts for the compute instances, Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk volumes, GPUs, and TPUs in your project, folder, or organization.

For more information about usage data and forecasts—including limitations, data availability, and data updates—also see View usage and forecast data.

Usage data

You can view the usage data of the compute instances, Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk volumes, GPUs, or TPUs in your project, folder, 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 track the usage data of your resources:

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

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

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

Capacity Planner also provides an overview that summarizes the overall resource usage of your project, folder, or organization. The overview includes potential action items and the regional distribution of your resources.

Forecasts

You can view the forecast of the compute instances, Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk volumes, GPUs, or TPUs in your project, folder, or organization to help you predict your future capacity needs. The forecast in Capacity Planner is a combination of the following:

• A linear and superlinear model.

• Yearly seasonality effects on usage, for projects, folders and organizations that have at least two years of usage data.

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.

Pricing

There is no additional cost for using Capacity Planner. You are only charged for any billable Google Cloud resources that you create or use with Capacity Planner.

For example, if you reserve capacity in Capacity Planner, then any Compute Engine resources in your project are subject to Compute Engine pricing. Additionally, if you export data to a Cloud Storage bucket or BigQuery table, then any Cloud Storage resources or BigQuery resources in your project are subject to Cloud Storage pricing and BigQuery pricing respectively.

Get support

To learn how to get help with Capacity Planner, see Get support.

Prerequisites

To start using Capacity Planner, complete the following prerequisites:

1. If your project has not used Capacity Planner before, enable Capacity Planner for your project.
2. Set up Capacity Planner for each new user.

Enable Capacity Planner for a project

Important: If you can't access Capacity Planner, then your organization might not be eligible to access and use Capacity Planner. To request access, contact your technical account manager (TAM) or the sales team.

1. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Roles required to select or create a project

   • Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
   • Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator role (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains the resourcemanager.projects.create permission. Learn how to grant roles.

   Go to project selector

2. Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

3. Enable the Capacity Planner API.

   Roles required to enable APIs

   To enable APIs, you need the Service Usage Admin IAM role (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin), which contains the serviceusage.services.enable permission. Learn how to grant roles.

   Enable the API

Set up Capacity Planner for a new user

To start using Capacity Planner as a user, do the following:

1. To get the permissions that you need to use Capacity Planner, ask your administrator to grant you the required IAM roles on the project. Refer to the documentation for each task to see its required permissions.

   For example, if you want to start learning how to use Capacity Planner by viewing usage and forecast data, consider requesting the Capacity Planner Viewer (roles/capacityplanner.viewer) role on the project.

   For more information about granting roles, see Manage access.

2. If you want to use the API for Capacity Planner, learn how to Authenticate to Capacity Planner.

What's next

• View usage and forecast data