Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ensuring seamless data flow and robust application performance is crucial in modern networking and cloud computing. Traffic mirroring enables enhanced network observability, allows for effective troubleshooting, and facilitates the testing of new features without interrupting live traffic. It captures and replicates network traffic, providing a powerful solution for maintaining and optimizing network operations.

Reliability testing is ongoing work, and tracking that work can be difficult in large organizations. Engineers run one-off experiments, scheduled Scenarios run in the background, and, for more mature teams, CI/CD workflows fire off automated tests on demand. According to our own product metrics, teams run an average of 200 to 500 tests each day! With so much happening, it’s hard to keep track of everything going on in Gremlin—until now.

Docker is a helpful tool for application management. You can use Docker in various ways: in the standalone mode, using Docker Compose on a single host, or by deploying containers and connecting Docker engines across multiple hosts. The user can use Docker containers with the default network, the host network, or other more advanced networks like overlays. This depends on the use case and/or the adopted technologies.

This series of blogs, Monthly Module Mondays, started on April Fool’s Day 2024 discussing how to Inventory and remediate Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) has now reached the 10th installment showcasing a couple of modules to take stock of what services are running on your systems.

Editor's Note: This post originally published May 2024. It was updated January 2025. In today's fast-paced world, the unexpected is always around the corner. Imagine an associate suddenly slips off a ladder in your retail store during the holiday season while it’s buzzing with activity. Would they be able to call for help? If not, someone needs to be notified, especially if customers or other associates don’t witness the fall or notice the injured associate on the ground.

Handling logs in a large-scale server infrastructure is no small task. It’s a critical component of maintaining smooth operations, especially for industries like healthcare, where over 1,000 servers might be managing everything from patient records to billing systems. When these logs are scattered and disconnected, this disarray slows troubleshooting, fragments operational insights, and ultimately undermines system reliability.

How is DevOps going within your organization? If you need help measuring its success, we have prepared a list of key DevOps metrics such as MTTR MTBF, MTTA, and MTTF to track. These metrics can help you understand how your team is doing over time.

This post was written by Martin Thwaites and Vivian Lobo. The OpenTelemetry Collector is an exceptional solution for proxying and enhancing telemetry, but it’s also great for generating telemetry from machines too. In this post, we’ll go through a basic, opinionated setup of using the OpenTelemetry Collector to extract metrics and logs from a Windows server.

Modern IT environments are complex and interconnected, making observability essential for maintaining system and application performance. The challenge is not just about ensuring systems run smoothly; it’s about understanding the complicated web of data, services, and user interactions that drive your operations. This is where observability comes into play. Observability offers a deeper understanding of why issues arise in the first place.

BigPanda was honored to be a premier sponsor of Gartner’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference (IOCS) in Las Vegas, Nevada. This event allowed us to showcase the latest BigPanda capabilities, connect with industry leaders, and gain valuable insights into the future of IT operations. For those who couldn’t attend, here are the three most impactful insights from my conversations with the customers, vendors, and analysts at IOCS 2024.