The most critical component of any management framework is its ability to constantly measure its effectiveness with a goal of constantly improving each process and ensuring that there is no degradation in the overall quality of solution.

When managing a tape library there are many indicators that can be used calculate the overall library health.

• The Quality Control mechanisms should provide an overall library score based on real-time information.
• Quality Control scores should be recorded over time to produce a historical record of process performance and to visually demonstrate process improvement.
• The Quality Control mechanism should provide a diagnosis along with clear instructions on how to cure all identified problems.

• Days since last library synchronization.
• Existence of offsite tapes.
• Days since last offsite.
• Existence of pre-identified lists of critical tapes which need to be offsite.
• Days since the last list of pre-identified tapes was produced.
• Number of predefined lists which have one or more tapes not offsite.
• Number of reconciliation errors.
• Number of tapes with low quality scores.