RTO / RTA

‍Last Updated: October 11th, 2023

Problem Statement

Preparing for Disaster Recovery (DR) procedures brings complexity. It's important to have disaster recovery metrics and strategies in place to measure and improve disaster readiness. Two of the most important disaster recovery metrics include RTO and RTA.

Solution

What does RTO and RTA actually mean? RTO is the period of time that is defined by an organisation to restore an affected service. RTA is the actual time taken to restore a service or perform data recovery. The Cutover API has the capability for you to calculate both. While Cutover is not a reporting tool, the RTO and RTA can be calculated to provide greater visibility to your internal stakeholders.

Key Benefits

• Create bespoke dashboards or reports based on Cutover data
• Amalgamate critical runbook data with stakeholder dashboards

Recipe

Our customers can have specific internal and external reporting needs and Cutover has many dashboards that provide critical real-time data. By using our extensive Cutover API, our customers are able to create their own reports. One such example is a RTO/RTA report. Let’s get started with the recipe:

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1. Execute the Get a Runbook API and store the start_planned attribute of your Runbook as a variable.  

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Note: An API request will be required for each runbook that requires an RTO and RTA.

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2. Using the Runbook ID identified in step 1, perform a GET request to List tasks in a Runbook. The API will retrieve information regarding your tasks including any application task you may want to report on.  Please store the end_planned attribute from your application task.

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3. In order to calculate the RTO, use the end_planned and the start_planned returned in step 1 and 2 to do the following calculation:  

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Planned finish time of the application task minus the planned start time of the runbook.

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4. Once your application runbook has been completed in a live run, locate the application task using the List Tasks in a Runbook API. You will need to store the end_actual attribute.

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5. Execute the Get a Runbook endpoint and store the start_actual attribute as a variable.

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6. In order to calculate the RTA, use the end_actual and the start_actual returned in step 4 and 5 to do the following calculation:

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Actual finish time of the application task minus the start time of the runbook.

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