Bacularis in organizations

Part 3: Monitoring, reporting and everyday operations

Bacularis provides tools that help IT teams monitor Bacula environments, analyze job activity, work with operational data, and automate routine tasks.

In this article, we present the most useful Bacularis tools for monitoring Bacula resources and collecting information about the backup environment. We also provide several practical tips that can help streamline everyday work in Bacularis.

Key capabilities

Below are some of the features covered in this article.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is the central starting point of the Bacularis interface and a useful place to begin everyday work.

It provides information about what has recently happened in the backup environment, what is currently happening, and what is scheduled for the near future.

If something is going wrong in Bacula, the Dashboard is often the first place where signs of the problem can be seen.

Users with full access can see statistics and metrics for the entire Bacula environment available to them.

If a user has restricted access to Bacula resources and also has access to the Dashboard, the summary information displayed there is limited to the resources available to that user.

This is particularly useful in organizations where different users have restricted access to different Bacula resources.

Job reports

Bacularis provides reports showing Bacula job activity for each day.

These reports make it possible to see which jobs completed successfully, which finished with warnings, and which ended with errors.

For each job, its job log can also be displayed directly from the report. This makes it easier to investigate problems without navigating to separate job status pages.

Reports are organized by month and updated continuously as jobs are executed.

Report entries can also be filtered to show warnings and errors together or errors only.

CSV export

CSV export is particularly useful for users who access Bacularis to collect operational data or prepare reports.

The contents of tables can be saved as CSV files and then processed externally, used to generate charts, or imported into other applications that support CSV files.

The same tabular data can also be copied directly to the system clipboard and pasted into another document or application.

Global search

Global search provides three main functions:

• it is easily accessible from almost anywhere in the interface, except for wizards, and can also be opened with a keyboard shortcut,
• it can quickly find Bacula resources from both the Bacula database and Bacula configuration,
• it provides direct access to resource pages by selecting a search result.

A Bacularis administrator can globally enable or disable individual search categories such as Jobs, Pools, Storage, or Director configuration.

For users with restricted access, the search engine returns only resources that the user is allowed to access.

It also does not provide access to areas of the interface for which the user does not have sufficient permissions.

Details: Search box documentation

Job logs

The most detailed information about Bacula jobs can usually be found in job logs.

Job logs are available in several areas of the Bacularis interface. From these locations, a log can be saved to a file, copied to the clipboard, sorted, or refreshed.

This allows an operator to quickly collect information needed to investigate a problem or share a job log with another member of the team.

Tables, filters, and search

Bacula resource tables provide search functionality that can filter items using keywords or parts of keywords.

Most tables also provide column-specific filters that make it possible to select particular resources.

Multiple filters can be combined to further narrow the displayed data.

Data views

Users can create their own custom table views for Bacula resources.

This makes it possible to build custom subsets of data using defined conditions such as logical operators, arithmetic operators, regular expressions, and other selection methods.

For example, resources in the FileSets table can be divided into groups based on the jobs or Bacula clients that use them.

Data views are assigned to individual users.

Each user can create and manage their own private data views, which are available only to that user.

Tags

Tags can be used to mark Bacula or Bacularis resources with visual labels.

Bacularis supports both local tags, which are available only to the user who created them, and global tags, which are visible to all users.

Global tags are particularly useful in multi-user environments.

For example, a backup operator can mark a job with a global TO CHECK tag to let other users know that the job requires attention.

In this way, global tags can serve as a lightweight coordination mechanism between operators.

When creating a tag, the user can select its severity, ranging from trivial to critical, as well as its color.

This makes tags easier to recognize visually and also useful for filtering.

Details: Tag documentation

Graphs and charts

Different areas of Bacularis provide graphs and charts that visually represent Bacula data.

Bacularis also provides a dedicated Graphs page with advanced job charts, multiple chart types, filters, and configurable time ranges.

This provides a useful overview of what is happening in the Bacula environment both in the short term and over longer periods spanning months or years.

Audit log

Bacularis provides administrators with an audit log for reviewing user activity.

Each significant user action can be recorded together with information such as:

• the exact time of the action,
• the action category, such as configuration, application, action, or security,
• the user name,
• the IP address from which the action was performed,
• the action status, such as information, warning, or error,
• a description of what was performed.

The audit log helps administrators analyze user activity and identify unexpected or potentially incorrect actions.

It is also configurable. Administrators can decide which categories and action statuses should be recorded and which should be ignored.

Notification plugins can additionally send audit log entries as they occur, for example by email or to a Mattermost channel.

Bulk actions

Many Bacularis tables provide bulk actions for working with multiple resources at once.

Bulk actions can save the time and effort required to modify Bacula resources individually.

Before manually changing many items, it is therefore useful to check which bulk actions are available for the table being used.

Example actions include:

• starting or canceling jobs,
• canceling jobs for a selected client,
• assigning properties,
• deleting selected entries,
• and many others.

Available bulk actions depend on the resource type and the table being used.

Bacularis API

The Bacularis API is the same HTTP(S) interface that Bacularis uses internally to retrieve Bacula-related data and perform actions in the Bacula environment.

If an organization needs custom automation or scripts that work with Bacula data, the Bacularis API can serve as an integration layer.

The Bacularis API specification provides detailed information about available endpoints and their parameters.

Details: Bacularis API specification

Summary

Bacularis provides tools for daily monitoring, data analysis, reporting, team coordination, and automation.

Dashboards, filters, custom data views, tags, audit logs, bulk actions, and the API help administrators and operators work efficiently with Bacula environments.

This article concludes our three-part series on using Bacularis in organizations.

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⇒ Part 2: Teams, organizations and group management