working on capacity Planning for CPU utlization of a server and getting regular CPU utilization report for every 15 Mins and have threshold also. Now I want to know how should I calculate from the Report whether server is underutilized or over utilized keeping threshold value as 70%. Example of CPU Utilization Data time Utilization in % 2010-12-31 12:00:00 AM 40.00 2010-12-31 12:15:00 AM 20.00 2010-12-31 12:30:00 AM 80.00 2010-12-31 12:45:00 AM 90.00 2010-12-31 01:00:00 AM 99.00 2010-12-31 01:15:00 AM 89.00 2010-12-31 01:30:00 AM 56.00 2010-12-31 01:45:00 AM 88.00 2010-12-31 02:00:00 AM 90.00 Is there a specific way to calculate utlization with some formula and then decide up on whether upgrade of hardware is required or not? Rgds:Rahul Jain

depends a bit on what your computer is doing/supposed to do. you could have a single threaded app running with a core fully used (being processor limited at that point) and the cpu utilisation of the system would never reach the treshhold of 70% already as soon as it got 2 cores (again depeniding what else is running on your system). id take a look at perfmon counters, eg system/processor queue length, additionally, also measure for example your physical avg disk queue lengths to see if you have io bottlenecks. depending on your workload again, 15 mins as sample rate are propably too little. take a sql server, the sample comes when you have a index seek running which is parallelized, would get a 100% at that moment, while in general the sql server doesnt have to be at the cpu limit. for the table you have, youd propably just build the average, though it wouldnt tell you enough to decide if you need an hardware upgrade from my point of view