People measure both ways, and I recommend they do so. It's important to know that eventually all your backups worked every day, and it's also important to know how many failed in order to get there. Some customers try to ignore the latter, as they say to us, "all our backups were eventually successful, so who cares if they failed along the way?" My usual response is to ask that if 100% of their backups failed every night and had to be retried, would that concern them? They tell me, "of course." Alright, then. We agree it's a metric that should be measured. The only question is what level of failures is acceptable under that metric.
Most people try to shoot for 99%, but many people never get there without professional help. I believe that you should aim for 100% eventual success (first metric above). You can't look just at success rate, though. (Unless you're always getting 100%, of course.) You have to look for consecutive failures. It's bad enough to miss 1% of your backups every night. What if a given client is always in that 1%? If you're not looking specifically for consecutive failures, you could find that an individual client has not backed up in two weeks. --- W. Curtis Preston Backup Blog @ www.backupcentral.com VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of X_S Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 5:24 AM To: VERITAS-BU@mailman.eng.auburn.edu Subject: [Veritas-bu] Enterprise Backup Success Rate (Non Technical) do you guys count retries to the success rates? number of Job Attempts as opposed to just number of Jobs. Our overall completion rate is fairly high as well but i too wondered the definition of "success rate" +---------------------------------------------------------------------- |This was sent by [EMAIL PROTECTED] via Backup Central. |Forward SPAM to [EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu _______________________________________________ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu