capacity-planning

name	capacity_planning
description	Assess Azure resource capacity, quota utilization, and growth trends to prevent outages from resource exhaustion. Use when asked about capacity, quotas, scaling readiness, load testing prep, or growth projections.

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

Risk	Utilization
🟢 Low	< 70%
🟡 Medium	70-90%
🔴 Critical	> 90%

Sample output

Field	Value
Subscription	contoso-prod-001
Region(s)	East US, West Europe
Resources scanned	47
At risk (>70%)	5
Critical (>90%)	2

Resource	Current	At 2x Load	Action
vCPUs East US	85/100 (85%)	170 ❌	Quota increase
SQL DTU	78% avg	156% ❌	Scale up tier
AKS nodes	7/10	14 ❌	Increase max

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