Backup Service Level Agreement (SLA) Reports > Determining and Improving Backup Start Time Performance
  
Version 9.2.01
Determining and Improving Backup Start Time Performance
Use the Backup Start Time SLA report to gauge your backup efficiency. The Backup Start Time SLA report consists of a bar chart that provides a visual indicator of how long backups take to complete. Backup completion time is measured in days.
After you use this chart to identify the backups that represent poor performance, you can drill down to determine the causes so that you can prevent inefficiencies in the future. Your SLA determines what values represent poor performance vs. excellent performance. However, if you don’t currently have an SLA implemented, strive for Good (31‑60 minutes) performance by improving backup jobs with Average to Poor performance.
To determine and improve backup start time performance
1. Go to the Backup Start Time SLA.
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 segment represents 100% of the overall jobs for the day.
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 the poorly performing jobs and the reasons for the poor performance:
a. Click on the color‑coded bar segments that represent poor performance as defined by your SLA, drilling down into the actual jobs. As a general guideline, the Backup Start Time SLA report provides a few metrics:
Table 18.1 Performance Metrics
Metric
Performance
Started Within 30 minutes
Excellent
Started Within 31-60 minutes
Good
Started Within 61-120 minutes
Average
Started After 120 minutes
Poor
b. Identify any trends between backup jobs. For example, are the poorly performing backup jobs associated with a particular server?
4. Implement solutions to increase backup start time performance, such as:
Reduce the number of tape mounts.
Increase network speed.
Add additional processors or upgrade existing processors with faster processors.
Increase hard drive speed and size.