DPA: How does the "Three Strike Failed Clients" report work?

Symptoms

How does the Data Protection Advisor (DPA) "Three Strike Failed Clients" report work?

When is a client listed in the "Three Strike Failed Clients" report?

Resolution

The client needs to fail for three successive days. The report will list any client that had at least one failure in each of the 24 hour periods. That is, unless the "Successful retries discount earlier failures" option is selected on the Client Reporting panel in (File menu) System Settings, in which case it will ignore failures where a retry was successful in the specified time range (also editable via System Settings).

The 24 hour period is from the time you run the report. If you prefer the 24 hour periods are from midnight it would be best to schedule the report to run at midnight

Viewing the "Three Strike Failed Clients" in the Repot Editor and then selecting to edit it you would be presented with the source and operator it uses as follows:

1. The report starts with collecting backup status from 3 days and 2 days ago.
2. It then deduplicates the 3 day and 2 day backup status using the Deduplicate operator. This tests if the backup failed and then if a retry succeeds in the time range specified, the backup will be considered successful. This is requires having "Successful retries discount earlier failures" option selected on the Client Reporting panel in (File menu) System Settings. It also requires the "Retry Time Limit" option set (default is 12 hours). If there are multiple failures and then a final success in the Retry Time Window range the backup is still considered successful since it finally had a good backup.
3. The results are then merged. For merging an item must exists in both sides of the comparison. This means if there was a failure for the 2 days ago backup but not for the 3 days ago backup then that client will not be listed since when merging it did not exist as a failure in both days backup. 4. Next it then gets backup status from yesterday
5. Deduplicates that backup
6. merges with the result of the last merge. Thus, if a client did fail both 3 days ago and 2 days ago it would then be merged with yesterday's and if it failed yesterday too then the final merge would result in it being listed. Thus, only if the backup failed for three consecutive days will it be reported. If it succeeds in any of the days it will not be merged and not listed.