ITIL4F ITIL Management Practices Practice Question
A retail company is experiencing frequent service outages during peak hours due to insufficient capacity. The IT team wants to implement a practice that ensures the service provider has the capacity to meet agreed service level targets cost-effectively and in a timely manner. Which ITIL management practice should they use?
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
✓
Capacity and performance management
In ITIL 4, the practice that ensures the service provider has sufficient capacity to meet agreed service level targets cost-effectively and in a timely manner is Capacity and performance management. Option B represents this practice. Option A (Monitoring and event management) focuses on detecting events, not capacity planning. Option C (Availability management) focuses on availability, not capacity. Option D (Service level management and availability management) covers service levels and availability but not capacity. Therefore, B is correct.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Monitoring and event management
Why it's wrong here
Monitoring and event management primarily focuses on systematically observing services and service components, recording and reporting selected changes of state identified as events. While it can detect symptoms of capacity issues, such as high resource utilization alerts, its core purpose is not to plan, analyze, or optimize resource capacity itself. This practice provides valuable data for other practices but does not directly address the proactive capacity planning or management required to prevent frequent outages due to insufficient resources.
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Capacity and performance management
Why this is correct
Capacity and availability management is the best answer because it addresses capacity, which is the core requirement of the question. Note that the exact ITIL 4 practice name is Capacity and performance management, but among the options, this is the most appropriate.
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Availability management
Why it's wrong here
Availability management is primarily concerned with ensuring that services and components are available to perform their agreed function when required. This involves aspects like reliability, maintainability, serviceability, and resilience, focusing on preventing failures and ensuring rapid recovery. While insufficient capacity can certainly lead to service unavailability, this practice does not directly encompass the proactive analysis, planning, and optimization of resource sizing and performance to meet current and future demand, which is the specific focus of capacity management.
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Service level management and availability management
Why it's wrong here
Service level management establishes clear, business-focused targets for service performance and availability, which capacity management then strives to meet. However, SLM itself does not perform the technical analysis or planning of resource capacity. Availability management ensures services are available for use when needed, focusing on resilience and recovery, but it does not directly address the proactive planning and optimization of resource sizing to handle varying demand levels, which is the specific domain of capacity management. Therefore, neither practice, nor their combination, directly handles the core capacity planning challenge.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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