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Version: 2.15.0

RPO Trending and Reporting

Introduction​

RPO Trending and Reporting tracks how well your SyncIQ replication policies are meeting your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) targets over time. It calculates recovery-point metrics from OneFS SyncIQ Job Reports, compares them against a target RPO you set per cluster, and delivers the results as automated daily compliance reports — including anomaly detection for jobs that are running slower or less frequently than expected.

Licensing

RPO Trending and Reporting requires a separate feature license — PowerScale RPO Reporting. Check Inventory → License Management; if you see this license type listed in the table, the feature is licensed. If not, contact your Eyeglass sales representative.

This feature is distinct from general Cluster Configuration Reports (which summarize cluster settings rather than replication compliance), and from Monitoring and Alerts (which covers alarm delivery rather than scheduled compliance reporting).

Getting Started​

Follow these three steps to get RPO Trending and Reporting running on your Eyeglass appliance:

  1. Check that the RPO Trending and Reporting license is installed.
  2. Set up an RPO target per cluster.
  3. Set up email notification so daily reports can be delivered.

1. Check the License​

Open Inventory → License Management. If you see the license type PowerScale RPO Reporting in the table, you are licensed for this feature.

2. Set Up an RPO Target by Cluster​

Eyeglass requires an RPO target, in minutes, per cluster to perform the analysis. This is the target your organization wants to achieve; Eyeglass calculates the actual RPO achieved and compares it against this target in the daily emailed report.

note

The RPO target is an average for the entire cluster, not per-policy.

  • For a new cluster: enter the target in the Maximum RPO Value field on the Add Managed Device dialog when adding the cluster.
  • For an existing cluster: open Inventory View, right-click the cluster, select Edit, enter the new value in Maximum RPO Value, and click Submit.

3. Set Up Email Notification​

To receive the daily RPO compliance email, the Eyeglass appliance must have an email server and recipient addresses configured. See Monitoring and Alerts for SMTP and recipient setup.

RPO Calculations​

Data for RPO calculations comes from the SyncIQ Job Reports OneFS generates each time a SyncIQ policy job runs. These reports are collected:

  • When a PowerScale cluster is first provisioned in Eyeglass — the last 10 reports for each SyncIQ policy are collected.
  • Every 5 minutes thereafter — the last 10 reports for each SyncIQ policy are collected.
note

Reports for failed jobs are not collected and are not included in the statistics. For a canceled SyncIQ job, the RPO calculation starts when the canceled job began and ends when the next successful job for that policy completes. If a SyncIQ policy is deleted in OneFS, Eyeglass summary statistics continue to include reports for the deleted policy until they age out of the reported time frame.

Maximum Age of Unreplicated Data​

The last completion time of a SyncIQ policy does not represent your actual recovery point. The "age" calculation assumes the data's change rate matched the last SyncIQ policy report, and that this data is in flight but not yet successfully replicated.

Example: the last successful completion of a SyncIQ policy was 10 minutes ago, and that job took 5 minutes to replicate. The Maximum Age of Unreplicated Data is therefore 10 minutes (since last success) + 5 minutes (assumed replication time) = 15 minutes of data that would be lost in a DR event.

Job Duration​

The Job Duration reported in Eyeglass is the Duration reported in the OneFS SyncIQ Report for a policy job.

Amount of Replicated Data​

The Amount of Replicated Data reported in Eyeglass is the Total Data reported in the OneFS SyncIQ Report for a policy job.

Recovery Point Analysis​

Using the target RPO along with the average SyncIQ job duration, data transfer rate, and data change rate for a cluster, Eyeglass calculates a recommended SyncIQ job interval to reduce the number of jobs that violate the target RPO.

Average Data Transfer Rate​

The Average Data Transfer Rate reported in Eyeglass is the Total Data reported in the OneFS SyncIQ Report for the cluster's policy jobs, divided by the total duration of all jobs for the reported period.

SyncIQ Jobs Troubleshooting​

SyncIQ Policy Interval and Transfer Rate are assessed against the average SyncIQ policy interval and transfer rate over the last 30 days.

note

Interval is the difference between the start times of two consecutive SyncIQ jobs — it may not match the configured schedule, for example if a job takes longer to run than its scheduled interval.

The following anomalies are reported in the daily email report, by policy:

  • The number of jobs where the transfer rate is at least 50% below the average transfer rate (this difference factor is configurable — see below).
  • The number of SyncIQ policy jobs that did not run in the last 24 hours, but should have based on the 30-day average interval.
  • The number of jobs where the interval is more than double the average interval (this difference factor is also configurable).

Changing the Troubleshooting Thresholds​

Both thresholds are set in system.xml on the appliance — there is no igls CLI command for this setting:

  1. SSH to the Eyeglass appliance and sudo su to the root user.
  2. cd /opt/superna/sca/data
  3. Make a backup of the file before editing it: cp system.xml system.xml.bak
  4. Edit system.xml:
    • The Transfer Rate Threshold is the <transferatethld> tag. Default is 2, meaning the notice posts when the 24-hour transfer rate is less than 50% (1/2) of the 30-day average. Setting it to 3 would change the trigger to less than 33% (1/3) of the average.
    • The Interval Threshold is the <intervalthld> tag. Default is 2, meaning the notice posts when the 24-hour interval is more than double the 30-day average. Setting it to 5 would change the trigger to more than 5x the average.
  5. Save your changes.
  6. Restart the service: systemctl restart sca

Example Daily Report​

The daily RPO compliance report includes, per cluster, both a last 24 hours and last 30 days view:

  • Number of Jobs — count of SyncIQ jobs run per cluster.
  • Total Amount of Replicated Data (GB) — total data replicated per cluster.
  • Percentage of Jobs Violating RPO — against the RPO target (in minutes) configured for that cluster.
  • Average Amount of Replicated Data (GB) — per job.
  • Average Job Duration (minutes).
  • Average Data Transfer Rate (Mb/s).
  • Recovery Point Analysis — cluster-level diagnostics, for example: "Policy accesszone1: setting to run job at the interval 2 minutes per 24 hour period will lower the RPO violation rate."
  • SyncIQ Jobs Troubleshooting — per-policy detected problems, for example: "No SyncIQ jobs have been run for the last 24 hours. The average 30 day interval between jobs is 320.14 minutes." or "Found 43 jobs that have the transfer rate lower than the policy average rate 193.92."

RPO Charts​

Legacy UI

The steps below describe the legacy DR Dashboard. The underlying calculations (Maximum Age of Unreplicated Data, Job Duration, Average Data Transfer Rate — see RPO Calculations above) are unchanged; confirm the current navigation path for generating these charts in the 2.15.0 GUI's Reports page before relying on the exact click-path below.

In addition to the emailed daily report, Eyeglass can generate two interactive charts on demand, each plotting up to 6 SyncIQ policies together:

  • SyncIQ Job RPO Chart — plots Maximum Age of Unreplicated Data (diamond markers) and Job Duration (circle markers), in minutes, per successful SyncIQ job over a selected date/time range. Each policy is plotted in a different color. Selecting a cluster overlays its configured RPO target on the chart — points above the target line are shown in red — and a slider lets you interactively raise or lower the target line to see how many jobs would violate a different threshold.
  • SyncIQ Job Data Transfer Chart — plots total data replicated (in GB) per successful SyncIQ job over the same selectable date/time range, again up to 6 policies at once.

To generate either chart:

  1. Open the DR Dashboard and select the checkbox for the policy (or policies — up to 6) you want to chart.
  2. Click Generate SyncIQ Job Charts.
  3. Set the From and To date/time in the report time range settings.
  4. Click Launch SyncIQ Job RPO Chart or Launch SyncIQ Job Data Transfer Chart.

Hover over any data point for its exact values.

Interpreting the Charts​

  • Am I meeting my RPO target? Use the RPO Chart with the cluster's target overlaid — any point above the target line is a job that violated the RPO for that run.
  • Are my SyncIQ policies performing as expected? Cross-reference chart outliers against the SyncIQ Jobs Troubleshooting anomalies (policies that didn't run, or ran with an abnormal transfer rate or interval).
  • How far back can I recover? The RPO Chart's worst-case exposure is the point where sliding the RPO target line to the right first clears every red (violating) point — that value is the actual worst-case data-age exposure for the selected period.
  • How much bandwidth is used, and when? The Data Transfer Chart shows transfer volume over time per policy; combine with Average Data Transfer Rate to estimate the WAN throughput needed to hit a lower RPO target.

RPO CSV Reports​

In addition to the HTML daily compliance email, Eyeglass attaches two CSV reports to the same scheduled email:

  • RPO CSV Report — the same job-level data as the HTML report, in CSV form.
  • Policy CSV Report — a per-policy view with 24-hour, 30-day, and 60-day statistics, including a percent-of-target (PCT) column calculated from the Maximum RPO Value configured for that cluster in Inventory.

Because the RPO value used for the PCT calculation is just a number in the CSV, you can adjust it directly in a downloaded report to model compliance against a different target than the one currently configured in Eyeglass, without changing the live cluster setting.

Cluster Configuration Reports​

In addition to RPO compliance reporting, Eyeglass collects key cluster settings for managed PowerScale clusters and makes them available as an HTML report, by email or on demand. Use this report to keep DR run-book documentation of cluster configuration current — useful for IT planning, cluster expansion, networking, and security review.

Cluster Configuration Email Report​

By default, the full cluster HTML report (containing key cluster settings) is emailed daily at midnight to all users configured for email notification.

Cluster Configuration Report On-Demand​

  1. Log in to Eyeglass.

  2. Open the Reports page (sidebar).

  3. Click the header Create Report button and select Cluster Report.

  4. Once generated, the report appears in the Reports list with Type "Cluster Report", named <cluster name>_cluster_report_<timestamp>.html.

  5. Use the row's ... menu to open the report in a new Cluster Report Viewer window, with a table of contents linked to each section.

    note

    The report highlights configuration changes since the previous report — items added are shown in green, items removed in red.

  6. To save the report as a PDF, use Print/Save in the Cluster Report Viewer window, then select Save as PDF.

note

The legacy confirmation dialog with a View Running Jobs link, and the Delete Selected bulk action, do not carry over to the 2.15.0 Reports page. Deletion is handled by a trash icon in the page header, acting on whichever rows' checkboxes are selected — there is no separate Delete Selected button and no View Running Jobs dialog. See Reports for the redesigned page.

Cluster Networking for Failover and Cluster Reports​

Cluster networking information is included in cluster reports and can also be viewed in the zone inventory tree (right-click the Inventory element and select Show Properties). Each Access Zone maintains a mapping to subnet pools and configuration data — this is key context for planning Access Zone failover and Runbook Robot configuration, and for verifying complete failover/failback operations between sites.

note

Cluster Usage reporting (Cluster Storage Monitor) is deprecated, with no 2.15.0 replacement, and is not covered by this page.

See Also​

Add Clusters

Set the initial Maximum RPO Value when onboarding a new PowerScale cluster.

See More

Monitoring and Alerts

Configure the email and syslog delivery mechanisms that RPO compliance reports and alarms rely on.

See More

Alarm Codes Reference

Look up SCA alarm codes related to replication job failures and configuration backup jobs referenced in RPO reports.

See More