CISA Practice Question: Information Systems Operations and Business Resilience
An IT auditor is reviewing capacity management. The server team monitors CPU utilization and disk space. They receive alerts when thresholds are exceeded. Which practice is most effective for proactive capacity planning?
⚠ Common exam trap
CISA often tests the difference between proactive and reactive controls — candidates pick threshold alerts because they sound like monitoring best practice, but alerts are reactive detection, not proactive planning.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Analyzing historical utilization trends
Analyzing historical utilization trends allows the team to identify growth patterns, seasonal peaks, and long-term capacity exhaustion points before thresholds are breached. This is the essence of proactive capacity planning: using past data to predict future demand rather than reacting to alerts. Threshold alerts and manual checks are reactive or operational, not strategic planning practices.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Performing weekly manual checks
Why it's wrong here
Weekly manual checks still rely on a human reading current utilisation, so they detect breaches after they occur rather than forecasting future demand. Manual review suits small, static environments; proactive planning needs automated trend analysis and forecasting against historical growth data.
- ✓
Analyzing historical utilization trends
Why this is correct
Analysing historical utilisation trends reveals growth patterns and seasonal peaks, allowing capacity to be provisioned before thresholds are breached. Threshold alerts are reactive, firing only once consumption is already excessive, whereas trend analysis supports genuine proactive forecasting and planning.
- ✗
Increasing server resources quarterly
Why it's wrong here
Adding resources on a fixed quarterly schedule ignores actual utilisation trends, so capacity still lags demand between cycles. It is tempting because over-provisioning does prevent exhaustion, but that is periodic headroom padding, not the trend-based forecasting that proactive planning requires.
- ✗
Setting threshold alerts at 90% utilization
Why it's wrong here
Alerting at 90% reacts after headroom is nearly exhausted, leaving no lead time to procure or provision capacity. Threshold alerting is tempting because it is simple to configure and catches imminent exhaustion, but proactive planning requires trend analysis and forecasting against historical growth to act before saturation.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official ISACA exam blueprint
This CISA practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISACA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CISA exam.