Capacity management is a process used to manage information technologies (hereinafter IT). The objective is to ensure that the capacity of IT systems meets the present and future requirements of the organization at affordable costs. One of the common definitions of capacity management is defined by the ITIL framework. The different versions of ITIL consider that capacity management encompasses three subprocesses: business capacity management, service capacity management and component capacity management (known as resource capacity management in ITIL version 2).

As the use of IT services changes and functionalities evolve, processing capacity, memory, etc. it also changes. It is necessary to understand the impact of the load on the resources/infrastructure of the current Business demand and how it will change over time, to plan the necessary action plans that guarantee that the needs of the Business are covered while eliminating the risk forecast (possible saturation of systems, possible breakage of Sla's, etc.) so that the management of IT services is proactive and simplified (lower number of incidents). For example, if there are sudden increases in the need for processing capacity at a certain time of day, it should be analyzed what happens during those hours and make the necessary changes to maximize the necessary infrastructure, such as performing a tune-up of the applications or scheduling batch process cycles at a time with less use.

These activities are carried out to optimize performance and efficiency, and to plan and justify investments. Capacity management takes into account:

Capacity management interacts with the discipline of performance engineering, both during requirements gathering and the design and construction activities of a system, as well as when using performance monitoring to obtain information on the capacity of the systems used.

It is increasingly important to maintain a constant link with demand management, so that any entry of new needs (projects, new services, etc.) can be influenced with a criterion of performance and efficiency.

Capacity management is a process used to plan the occupation of industrial processes by which the theoretical capacity of the process and its occupation according to demand are determined, so that an optimal installation and response to demand is achieved.