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by Adam Stuflick on Nov 14, 2023 6:30:00 AM
Measuring your backup performance may sound like a daunting task. But it doesn't have to be. Once you know what you need to track and understand how your backups are performing, it's actually quite painless. That's where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come in handy. They help you measure the effectiveness of your backup and recovery strategy.
Want to learn more about what KPIs in general are? Watch this less than 2-minute video from the Balanced Scorecard Institute.
Understanding the Importance of Backup Performance
Backup is a vital component of any organization's IT infrastructure. It ensures that your business‑critical data, applications, and systems are protected and can be restored quickly and reliably in the event of data loss, corruption, ransomware, or a full system outage. However, simply having a backup solution in place is not enough; consistently measuring and evaluating your backup performance is equally important.
The ability to recover data in a timely and predictable manner is what really matters. Slow backups, missed backup windows, or unreliable backup data can result in extended downtime, lost productivity, compliance issues, and even lost revenue. That’s why it’s crucial to regularly review and understand your backup performance over time, using clearly defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that reflect the needs of your specific environment.
How Do I Define My KPIs?
Sometimes mistaken as KPIs (but they really aren't) are RTO - Recovery Time Objective - and RPO - Recovery Point Objective. These two “objectives” will help you define what your KPIs should be, or rather, what the value of your KPIs should be for your specific environment to indicate the health of your backup environment.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) |
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) |
| RTO describes the maximum amount of downtime that your organization can tolerate before the disruption seriously impacts operations and revenue. | RPO describes the point in time that your backup solution must be able to recover to. |
| Ask yourself: How long should your restore take to make the needed data available? | Ask yourself: How much data loss is feasible without ruining your business? |
| For example, if you can postpone meetings and orders for two days without risking serious damage to your revenue, your RTO is 2 days. | For example, if your RPO is two hours, you need to be able to recover data that was created no more than two hours before the data loss event. |
Just keep in mind that different types of data have different availability requirements. And, for example, higher availability requirements will impact your backups and dictate a shorter (or even continuous) backup interval. Your answer may be that certain functions or systems are more important than others, so understanding RTO and RPO will help you build prioritization into your backup strategy.
To learn more about how to approach and define your backup strategy, read our whitepaper.
By thinking through and determining your RPO and RTO, you can now define what your specific KPIs should look like, providing valuable insight into your backup performance.
Typical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Backup
There are several Key Performance Indicators you can track to measure your backup effectiveness and gain valuable insight into your backup performance and reliability over time. Monitoring these metrics regularly helps you identify issues early, optimize your configuration, and validate that your backup strategy is aligned with your business requirements.
These are the common KPIs we recommend tracking for your backup environment:
- Backup Success Rate / Backup Failure Rate: This KPI measures the percentage of successful backups compared to the total number of backups attempted. A reliable backup system is indicated by a consistently high backup success rate (or a low backup failure rate). Tracking this trend over days, weeks, and months helps you quickly spot recurring issues, misconfigurations, or infrastructure constraints that could put your data at risk.
- Storage Capacity and Usage: This KPI tells you how much space you have left and whether you have enough capacity for your planned backup strategy of full, differential, or incremental backups. It also helps you anticipate when you will need to add storage or adjust retention policies. Knowing your Backup Size is equally important here, as rapid growth in backup size can indicate changes in your data footprint, unexpected data duplication, or ineffective exclusion rules.
- Backup and Restore Time: This KPI measures the average time it takes to complete a backup or restore. It helps you evaluate the efficiency of your backup system and, more specifically, ensures that your Recovery Time Objectives are being met. This KPI goes hand in hand with the Backup Window you set for yourself—the time frame during which a backup must complete without impacting production workloads. Tracking both backup and restore times helps validate that you can recover quickly enough to keep your business running.
These are the common KPIs we recommend tracking. And if you really like KPIs, there are many more you can add to your routine, such as monitoring backup job frequency, data change rates, or restore success rates. But the ones listed above will get you started on understanding the health of your backup environment and give you a solid foundation to build on as your needs evolve.
Want to talk about any of these KPIs and discuss what they should be for your environment? Or do you have any other backup-related questions? Feel free to contact us.
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