Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

Monitoring cloud costs can be complex. When those costs span more than one cloud service provider (CSP) or SaaS provider, that complexity can make it difficult to understand your overall spending. Datadog Cloud Cost Management (CCM) enables teams to understand cloud costs, but each provider tags its cost data differently. Teams need to understand each provider’s unique cost data model before they can make sense of their costs in each cloud.

Google’s comprehensive AI offering includes Vertex AI, a cloud-based platform for building and deploying AI applications, AI Studio, a web platform for quickly prototyping and testing AI applications, and Gemini, their multimodal model. Gemini offers advanced capabilities in image, code, and text generation and can be used to implement chatbot assistants, perform complex data analysis, generate design assets, and more.