Follow best practices when using executive reports to maximize their usefulness.
Identify and create templates specifically for executive report
Identify a set of existing templates—or create some new ones—that show the specific areas of interest at your site. Use these templates to generate a set of executive reports for various periods: hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.
Have executive reports emailed to you
Have the reports emailed to you automatically for a minimum 30-day period of normal operation. Do this for all tape system resources, particularly for a large tape system: robots, CAPS, drives, media, and so on.
Create a Site Operational Summary
Use the reports to create a Site Operational Summary document that calls out both general and specific aspects of normal operation at your site. By understanding your site's operational profile and having a summary that can be shared, you can more easily identify anomalies in operations.
For example:
Every Thursday at 16:00: Spike in usage of drives in A–01, up to 60 percent, due to the weekly scientific data import
Data compression range: 1 to 3.5
Drive efficiency: approximately 97 percent
Typical number of monthly cleans: 4