Backup Compliance & Recovery Dashboard – Splunk

As Backup Product Owner at La Banque Postale, I led the development of Splunk dashboards designed to help application owners monitor backup coverage, identify unprotected servers, and access recovery information.

Through interviews with application owners, I discovered that many production servers remained unprotected simply because their owners weren't aware that backups were missing. Existing information was scattered across technical systems and wasn't easily accessible to application managers.

Rather than developing a new web application, I decided to integrate backup information directly into Splunk, a platform already widely used by our infrastructure and application teams.

We developed an automated data pipeline collecting information from Veritas NetBackup and created dashboards combining backup status, application inventory, recovery points, and ITSM remediation workflows.

The solution was delivered over five two-week Scrum sprints, with regular user demonstrations, and contributed to the bank's broader initiative to achieve nearly 100% production backup coverage.

Project Context - Unidentified lack of backup in production

As part of our backup compliance improvement program, I interviewed application owners to understand why some production servers were not protected. One important finding was that missing backups were not always the result of deliberate decisions.

Many application owners simply didn't know whether their servers were backed up. Some had inherited applications from previous teams and had no visibility into the backup configurations established years earlier. Checking backup status required technical knowledge, access to individual servers, or investigation through IBM IWS scheduling information.

We needed to make backup coverage understandable and accessible to people who weren't necessarily backup specialists.

Initially, we considered developing a dedicated web application. However, after discussing users' existing workflows, I realized that Splunk was already their preferred entry point for infrastructure information.

We therefore decided to build the solution directly into Splunk, avoiding an additional application and reducing the learning curve.

Building the NetBackup-to-Splunk Data Pipeline

The first technical challenge was making backup information available within Splunk. My team developed an automated data collection process:

1. Extract backup information from the different NetBackup master servers several times per day.
2. Consolidate the exports into a shared storage location.
3. Use a Splunk agent to collect the exported files.
4. Refresh the backup dataset in Splunk.
5. Correlate backup information with application and server inventories from the CMDB.

This provided a regularly updated view of backup coverage across the infrastructure.

Developing Actionable Backup Dashboards

Once the data was available, we developed dashboards allowing application owners to register or select their applications and immediately understand their backup situation.

The dashboards provided several capabilities:

• Backup Coverage: Identify which application servers were protected and which were missing backups.
• ITSM Integration: Access service requests to activate backup protection on unprotected servers.
• CMDB Data Quality: Identify missing server-to-application relationships and request corrections to the application inventory.
• Recovery Points: Display available backup recovery points that could be used for restoration.

The recovery-point feature was particularly valuable. Application teams could identify and reuse the appropriate recovery-point information to restore individual files or file systems through NetBackup. For full-server recovery, they could contact our backup team with the relevant recovery information already identified. This transformed the dashboard from a simple monitoring tool into a self-service entry point for backup compliance and recovery operations.

The dashboards also provided visibility for auditors monitoring production backup coverage.

Iterative Delivery with Application Owners

Because backup and recovery are complex subjects for non-specialists, I wanted application owners to be involved throughout development. I organized the project into five two-week Scrum sprints, with a user demonstration at the end of each sprint.

These sessions allowed us to collect feedback, simplify the interface, refine the displayed information, and prioritize features that would genuinely help users. The objective was to provide actionable information without requiring application owners to understand the underlying complexity of NetBackup.

• Product Discovery & Strategy: Interviewed application owners, identified the lack of backup visibility as a major cause of missing protection, and chose Splunk over a standalone web application based on existing user workflows.
• Technical Architecture: Defined the integration between NetBackup master servers, shared storage, Splunk ingestion, and CMDB application inventories.
• Product Ownership & Agile Delivery: Managed requirements, prioritized the backlog, and coordinated development over five two-week Scrum sprints.
• User Experience & Stakeholder Management: Led five user demonstrations, incorporated feedback into the dashboards, and aligned the solution with application-owner needs and backup compliance requirements.

• Delivered a complete solution in 10 weeks: Completed five two-week Scrum sprints with five user demonstrations, allowing continuous validation and refinement with application owners.
• Introduced automated backup visibility refreshed several times daily: Consolidated NetBackup exports into Splunk, providing application-level visibility into protected and unprotected servers without manual investigation.
• Enabled self-service remediation and recovery: Integrated ITSM requests for missing backups and CMDB corrections, while exposing available recovery points for file, file-system, and server restoration workflows.
• Strengthened production backup compliance monitoring: Provided application owners and auditors with a centralized view of backup coverage, supporting the bank's objective of approaching 100% protection across production infrastructure.