Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Written by Andrew Puch and Brian Langbecker You use NGINX as a proxy for your application, and you want to leverage your favorite features in Honeycomb to help make sense of the traffic data. Have no fear: Honeycomb is more than capable and ready to help! Things you will need: Before you start with the instructions, let’s discuss a lightweight tool called Honeytail. This utility will tail log files, parse the various formats, and send the data to Honeycomb.

As a DevOps engineer or SRE, you are often faced with investigating complex problems — mysterious application performance issues that happen intermittently or to only certain portions of your application traffic — that impact your end users and potentially your company’s financial targets. Sifting through hundreds or even thousands of transactions and spans can be a lot of tedious, manual, and time consuming investigative work.

As web applications become more complex, software engineering teams must rely on many different products and services to create the best developer experience. The application development ecosystem has grown beyond version control and hosting deployment. Manually managing the deployment of new features across all services can create a serious bottleneck in the software development lifecycle. It also introduces the risk of human error.

Big data experts already agree that the amount of generated data is growing exponentially and forecast that it will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025. That projection is predicated upon current realities, which include a growing number of internet users and the billions of embedded systems and connected devices around the world. Even conceptualizing that amount of data is daunting — but then consider how best to manipulate and export it.

Cisco ACI is an enterprise-class, software-defined networking (SDN) solution that provides complete control of the data center network. Using a policy-based approach, Cisco ACI delivers security, performance, and scalability for today’s demanding applications. Cisco ACI is part of the broader Cisco SDN portfolio, which also includes Nexus switches and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) controllers. If you are looking for a way to improve your data center network, Cisco ACI may be the answer.