There are some wonderful, very rich, deeply embedded aspects of the tool that allow things like workload characterization. Workload characterization is super-important because it lets us figure things out. Many people know, for example, that with Microsoft Word, Word.exe is the executable. Everybody knows their executable, but they don't always know what it does. It also launches other things. This tool has the ability and insight to track those things and to know: "Oh, you wanted this executable, but this one started this, so you must want this, too." And it tells you what it had to add, what it was using or was spawning. There are so many customers fellow customers I know who don't use this level of the tool.

There are also the modeling capabilities in the tool. 

There are also some of the new features, and I did a presentation at BMC Engage on this. We ingest a ton of business data. We are an insurance company and we have business data, like how many quotes are done an hour, and how many policies are sold per hour. The correlation engine in the new TrueSight Capacity Optimization components is wonderful. We can do correlation analysis over months of data, and then we run models to tell our business: "If you do 1,000 more quotes an hour, we're going to have to upgrade, and we're going to need this much more hardware." 

These are wonderful things. Our business partners love it. Our infrastructure people love it because they count on us so they're not surprised with something like, "Oh, all of a sudden we have to go buy servers? Well, we didn't have it in the budget." 

There are the old, rich features that are incredibly important to me. And then there are some of these new features which are wonderful. We're very excited about the future. Where the tool's headed, and what it can do for us.

There is an event component. We are currently manually entering events. That helps with custom views - as releases go out for software, that's an event. Then, all the charts and graphs for that system will have that as a flag and it shows up. The charting's all automatic. It's all on a website. It's refreshed every morning. The users can see, "Oh, why is my system high? Oh, well you know what, it happened right after this release." That kind of event management is part of Capacity Optimization. We also put in things other than releases, such as hardware failures. We know there are also capabilities to interact with the change management system. We'd like to investigate that, but it's a down-the-road project.

The most interesting feature is the simulation of the load using different servers or different KPI parameters of the business.