Determining and Improving Backup Duration Performance
Use the Backup Duration SLA report to gauge your backup environment’s efficiency. The Backup Duration SLA report consists of a bar chart. Backup completion time is measured in days.
Many backups run for a long time simply because they work with large amounts of data, not because of poor backup duration performance. However, sometimes a job with poor performance might be the result of a faulty tape drive that causes slow write speeds.
After you use this Backup Duration SLA chart to identify the backups that represent poor duration performance, you can drill down to determine if there is a problem. Your service level agreement determines what values represent poor performance. However, if you don’t currently have an SLA implemented, strive for Good (61‑120 minutes) performance by improving backup jobs with Average to Poor performance.
The Backup Duration SLA report provides the following metrics:
Table 2 Performance Metrics
Metric | Performance |
Completed Within 60 minutes | Excellent |
Completed Within 61-120 minutes | Good |
Completed Within 121-300 minutes | Average |
Completed After 301+ minutes | Poor |
To determine and improve backup duration performance
2. For each day, observe the number of backups in the bar graph’s y-axis or hold your cursor over the color‑coded segments to display the number of backups.
Each bar represents a specific day. If no bar appears for a specific day, then either no backup jobs ran that day or no data is available because the Data Collector and the Reporting Database were not installed at that time.
3. Identify poorly performing jobs:
a. Click on the color‑coded bar segments that represent poor performance, as defined by your SLA, drilling down into the actual jobs. Each segment represents a 100% of the overall jobs for the day.
b. Identify any trends between backup jobs. For example, are the poorly performing backup jobs taking place at a particular time?
4. Implement solutions to increase backup performance, such as:
• Back up during a less busy time.
• Increase network speed.
• Add additional processors or upgrade existing processors.