An intuitive and expected solution from SW would be for it to predict or forecast disk size requirements on a scheduled basis, or on demand, after having some time (a week? ten days? a month?) to discover a growth trend for NTA and other data.
This should be expanded to include any other solutions that consume data, and which will need attention from system admins or SAN/Storage team members, for accurately and adequately planning and installing enough storage to accomplish the need.
Further, it should have an option to quickly calculate future needs based on current trends AND on changes in retention settings. I'm envisioning something like a view which has a slider bar in it for each type of data's retention. Slide it from 30 days retention to ten or to one hundred or 365 days and watch the calculated disk space requirements change. Then pick the right retention time, OR add more disk.
That will give owners of SW products the ability to NOT have problems with disk size. It'll give them the option to discover how much disk they need to have stats retained for the time they want. And then they'll be able to either add disk, or budget for more disk, or choose to reduce the stats retention time based on disk limitations.
Nice, clean, and efficient. Just what SolarWinds should be!
