Monitoring
Recovery Point Objective
RPO
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data loss (measured in time) a business can tolerate after a disaster. An RPO of 15 minutes means backups or replication must run at least every 15 minutes; an RPO of zero requires synchronous replication.
In depth
RPO drives backup frequency and replication strategy. A payments database with an RPO of zero needs synchronous multi-region replication. A marketing analytics warehouse with an RPO of 24 hours can rely on nightly snapshots.
RPO and RTO are set together but answer different questions: RPO is 'how much data can we lose?', RTO is 'how long can we be down?'. Both belong in the service catalogue alongside the SLA.
Why it matters
RPO decides your backup bill. Sub-minute RPOs cost 10-100x more than daily-snapshot RPOs. Pinning down RPO per service prevents both under-investment (losing a day of orders) and over-investment (paying enterprise replication fees for a static marketing page).
Also known as
- Recovery Point Target
Related terms
Recovery Time Objective
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable time a system can be offline after an incident before …
SLA
A service level agreement (SLA) is a contractual commitment between a provider and a customer specifying a mea…
Incident
An incident is a confirmed period of degraded or unavailable service that requires human attention. Incidents …
Mean Time Between Failures
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is the average time a system operates between one incident and the next. MTB…
Service Level Objective
SLO means Service Level Objective — the internal reliability target a team commits to, such as 99.9% of homepa…
Browse the full Lemwatch monitoring glossary (47 terms).