What-If Scenario Planning

Forecast future business conditions. Determine service impact. Plan with confidence and certainty.

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How It Works

Choose which areas to stress-test

The world is unpredictable, but with the right AIOps toolkit, that's no longer a problem.

What-if scenario planning simulates changes in internal and external conditions so you can understand the impact on your service operations and plan accordingly. To begin, decide which component of your business services ecosystem you want to test against a hypothetical future situation. This can be any component of your company’s environment, from a single platform to overall sales revenue.

Set the scenario

Next, determine the conditions you want to apply. You can ramp (up or down) business drivers such as sales volume or impose technical constraints like the capacity of a specific server. The drivers can be positive or negative. You can also experiment with combining different conditions to observe what happens in a "perfect storm."

Plan for the future

At this point, you’ll be ready to review the results of your "what if" scenario and plan for the future. The outcomes are presented in a simple timeline format, showing precisely when and where critical thresholds will be reached. If the model identifies negative consequences on your systems, it will also recommend specific ways to mitigate them.

4 Reasons You’ll Love It

No more manual forecasts

Scenario simulations are automated and accurate (and don't require the time and effort of manual forecasting).

See the future

Get a clear view into various potential futures by freely combining internal and external conditions.

Unmatched flexibility

Create models for any system metric or KPI, on the timeline of your choosing.

Intuitive visualization

The models are presented as simple timelines that show when and where critical thresholds are reached – and the path that led there. If the model predicts that your systems will go red, it will suggest mitigation options.

Resources

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Documentation

Creating a What-if Simulation for Business Services

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Frequently Asked Questions

What types of scenarios can I run what-if planning simulation on?

You may use two types of what-if simulations:

Containerized Application What-if Simulation: In this scenario, using predictive forecasting and automated AI correlation, you can predict saturation based on growth scenarios, simulate events, forecast organic growth, and review recommendations to right-size resource allocations.

With this flow, you can build resource allocation plans to optimize spending and ensure service levels by aligning IT resources to dynamic business needs.
Business Service What-if Simulation: In this scenario, you may simulate how future business change scenarios impact resource utilization, receive machine learning (ML)-driven recommendations for future risk mitigation and analyze impact analysis on resources used to support a business service.

Using the business service what-if simulation, you can plan service resources to support dynamic business requirements, build service assurance and optimization roadmaps, and align IT to business needs.

In business service what-if simulations, how are business service risks predicted and correlated with system resources?

Using BMC’s proprietary machine learning correlation algorithms, we can automatically correlate business driver historical performance, which represents key business indicators, to resource consumption trends over time. These machine learning correlation and prediction algorithms use automated selection of the best correlation and forecasting models allowing single-click results requiring no model definition or trial-and-error selection.

Do these simulation models offer automated recommendations for risk mitigation and cost savings?

Yes. Both simulation models offer automated recommendations to mitigate future risks and cost savings opportunities. They allow users to plan ahead, maintain service level agreements (SLAs) and service level objectives (SLOs), and fix future problems before they impact your customers’ and users’ service levels and service availability.

Can I save simulation results and share them with others?

Yep! You can save, share, and export simulation results.