A customer was asking recently about the RPO for their estate, and I showed them a few things from the Estate tab in Redgate Monitor. This post covers a few highlights.
This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts
Knowing Your RPO
It’s not often I have been asked by a business user about the Recovery Point Objective, though I’ve seen plenty of DBAs ask business people what they want as an RPO. If you don’t know what an RPO is, read this, and then think of this as the amount of data I could potentially lose.
Not that I will, but it’s possible.
In Redgate Monitor, the Estate tab shows you the RPO for all databases, as a graph. I’m showing this one from the demo site at monitor.red-gate.com. As you can see, I have most of my databases with an RPO of 1 hour or less. The vast majority are under 12 hours.
Note: This graph doesn’t include databases that have never been backed up.
This is based on backups, not on clustering or AGs or anything else, but this does let me determine if I think my estate is healthy. I wish I could alert or easily monitor this, but I can see if there are problems.
If I scroll down, I can sort the table of all databases by the worst RPO. I see this, which shows the SSC server at the top.
I’m not worried, as this is an AG setup and the one database is backed up regularly. Obviously we had a hiccup as 3 days is crazy, but I’m confident someone fixed this as I see a lower RPO with the current backups that have been completed.
If I filter by these servers, things look better.
At an estate level, there may be systems with a large RPO. Data warehouses, or reporting systems aren’t backed up as they can be reloaded in an emergency.
This is a good way for you to keep a high level view of your estate. In general, you will get a feel for what the estate looks like and you can drill into individual systems or databases if you’re wondering. I wish I could filter by RPO, but maybe that’s coming one day.
Summary
This section of the Estate tab gives you a high level view of backups and how you’ve configured them. Ultimately your backup schedule is less important than the RPO it produces and this let’s you keep an eye on what the RPO is for everything.
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