Manage Environments

Environments filter incidents on properties such as source and priority and group them together for easy visibility and action. Environments make it easy for your team to focus on the incidents relevant to their role and responsibilities. Environments can be used to filter the incident feed, or can be used to create dashboards, set up sharing rules, and simplify incident search.

Your BigPanda Environments can be customized to fit the areas of responsibility and processes in your organization. Create, edit, or delete environments to help your teams stay focused on the most relevant information to them, or to fit your AutoShare and analytics needs.

For example, you can define custom environments for:

• An engineering team that is responsible for incidents related to a particular set of applications.
• Level-1 or NOC operators that work only on high-severity incidents.
• The emergency contacts of a customer-facing service. Include only critical alerts from the service, and then set up an AutoShare to immediately notify the emergency contacts.
• Business asset- or region-specific incidents. Use the environment to create Dashboards or Analytics Reporting.
• Incidents missing key tag or priority enrichment. Review incidents in the environment periodically to find correlation patterns that may be missing in your system setup.

🚧

Environment limits

We recommend limiting your organization to 300 environments for best BigPanda UI experience. Additional environments will degrade UI performance.

Each organization can have up to 500 environments total.

Relevant Permissions

Roles with the following permissions are granted varying levels of access to BigPanda Environments:

See the Roles Management page to learn more about Environment permissions in BigPanda.

👍

Audit Logs

When multiple users are working in the BigPanda platform, it’s vital to see historic information on system configuration changes. Audit logs are available for environments in BigPanda, allowing admins to keep track of configuration changes.

Users with the Audit Logs permission can view historical configuration changes and actions made related to environments. See the Use the Audit Log documentation for more information.

Automatic Environment Creation

To streamline environment creation, BigPanda can automatically create an environment during the initial setup of a monitoring integration. Simply select to create an integration at the Create an App Key step, and a new environment will be created with the same name as the integration. This environment will automatically group alerts sent from that integration and add them to the By Integration Source, or General environment group.

To automatically add an integration source environment:

During the Create an App Key step on the initial setup of a monitoring integration, select the Auto Create environment to group incidents from this monitoring tool checkbox.

Upon generating the app key, a new environment will be created with the same name as the integration. This environment will be added to the By Integration Source, or General environment group, and will be viewable by all users for your organization.

The environment will automatically include all incidents with one or more alerts from that integration source. Environments will include incidents with warning or higher severity, but will not include incidents with acknowledged or maintenance statuses.

The environment can be edited to adjust environment group, name, role access, or classification criteria.

🚧

Automatic environment creation

Automatic environment creation happens on the initial creation of the new monitoring integration. If you rename the integration later, make sure to manually update the matching environment.

For customers onboarded before 2023, the Auto Create environment to group incidents from this monitoring tool checkbox will be unselected by default. For new customers who will have Default Environments configured during setup, the checkbox will be selected by default.

Default Environments

To help classify incidents into useful groups, BigPanda includes default environments for organizations that onboard in 2023 or later. These environments are created automatically based on your system configuration and are viewable by all users for your organization. Default environments can be edited to adjust environment group, name, role access, or classification criteria.

Default environments will be created in two environment groups:

• By Integration Source
• Priority

Integration Source

The By Integration Source environment will contain any environments created using Automatic Environment Creation during intitial monitoring integration setup.

For customers with Default Environments configured for BigPanda, the Auto Create environment to group incidents from this monitoring tool checkbox will be selected by default. Simply click Generate App Key and a new environment will be created.

Priority

The Priority environment group automatically creates environments based on the 'priority' incident tag within BigPanda. The first time an incident is marked with a priority label, an environment will be created for that priority level.

To assign a priority label, operators can manually assign an incident a priority level in the incident feed, or an administrator can configure automatic priority enrichment.

The environment will have the same name as the priority level, and will automatically include all incidents from all monitoring sources that have that priority level. Environments will include incidents with warning or higher severity, but will not include incidents with acknowledged or maintenance statuses.

Priority level names and colors can be configured under the priority tag.

To stop the automatic creation of Priority environments, reach out to support.

Create an Environment

You can create new environments to fit any of your workflow and process needs.

To create a new environment:

1. Navigate to the Incidents tab.
2. At the top of the environments pane on the left, select the plus sign icon.
3. From the menu, select New Environment.
4. In the environment editor, enter your environment information in the relevant fields.

In the condition editor, set environment rules to limit and define which incidents appear in the environment. As you set rules, the preview pane to the right will show alerts that would be included under the current settings.

📘

Environment preview

Environment preview is built on a sample of existing incidents. Not all incidents that match the environment requirements will appear in the preview.

5. Select a Source from the dropdown to limit incidents by source. Sources are listed with an ALL option, e.g. Nagios (ALL), and by specific instances, e.g. Nagios-US-EAST1. To include incidents by all sources and configure the environment by different criteria, select All Sources.
6. To the right, check each box to include incidents with that status. Select Warning to include incidents with the Warning status. Select Ack/Maintenance to include incidents with the Acknowledged or Maintenance status. Incidents with Critical alerts are always included. To learn more about incident statuses, please see the Alert/Incident Status documentation.
7. (Optional) Click the Plus icon to add additional criteria based on incident properties such as incident tags or alert tags.
8. (Optional) To add a second source or additional top-level criteria, click Add Another.
9. When satisfied with the environment settings, click Save Environment.

📘

Duplicate an Environment

No need to start every environment from scratch! Duplicate an environment to create a new environment based on its settings. Click the Three Dots to the right of the environment name and select Duplicate. Adjust the settings to fit the new environment requirements and remember to give the environment a unique name.

Environment Criteria

When defining environments, you are able to filter incidents based on their alert properties or tags. You can filter environments by any standard or custom tags.

An incident is included in an environment if at least one of the active alerts meets the filter criteria. For example, if you add a condition that the check value must be cpu, an incident that contains a cpu alert and a memory alert will be included. Similarly, if you configure the environment to include only critical alerts, an incident that contains one active critical alert and several warning alerts will be included. This logic provides you with maximum visibility into any incidents that are potentially related.

📘

Environments with incident tags

When creating environments within BigPanda, you can also leverage incident tags such as priority, team, assignee, or business asset, speeding up triage and incident investigation.

To add environment criteria in the environment editor:

1. Click the Plus icon.
2. Select an available tag from the dropdown list. Standard and custom tags are auto-populated from your system. To narrow the options, type the name of the desired tag in the search bar at the top of the dropdown.
3. Select an operator.
4. Enter the value(s) to filter by. When using the Equals To or Not Equals To operators, enter the value you want to match. When using the In or Not In operators, enter a comma-separated list of the exact values you want to match. Do not use spaces between comma-separated values.

👍

Wildcards

When using the Equals To or Not Equals To operators, you can use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard to match multiple values that contain a common element. For example, entering “db-_.domain.com” finds all values that start with db- and end with domain.com.

You cannot use wildcards with the In List and Not In List operators.

To add additional criteria, repeat the environment criteria steps.

To delete a condition, click the Trash icon beside it.

To add an additional top-level condition or secondary source, click Add Another. To delete a top-level condition or secondary source, click the Trash icon at the top right of the editor box for that source.

When satisfied with the environment settings, click Save Environment.

Use the Advanced Editor

In addition to the Basic builder UI, BigPanda is able to use BigPanda Query Language (BPQL) to create criteria and conditions for environments.

To use the editor, select Advanced at the top of the environment criteria editor. Enter your BPQL filter in the text box.

When creating criteria and conditions using BPQL, the Query Assist feature helps you build a query. See Query Assist for more information.

Any conditions previously entered in the Basic editor will be translated automatically into BPQL in the Advanced editor Condition field. Adjust the conditions as desired.

❗️

Advanced environment editor

If you use the Advanced environment editor to create or edit an environment, the Basic environment editor will no longer be available. Once you click Save Environment, the environment will permanently be in Advanced mode.

If you haven’t saved the environment, revert back to the Basic editor at any time using the toggle at the top of the criteria editor and select Discard changes in the dialogue box.

Example Environment Queries:

• An environment with only Critical Incidents - no incidents with only the acknowledged or warning statuses - from All Systems: source_system = * AND status = critical AND zero_impact != "true"
• An environment with all incidents that include a ‘CPU overloaded check’ from All Nagios Systems: source_system = /nagios..*/ AND check = "CPU overloaded" AND zero_impact != “"true"
• An environment for all incidents from All Systems that affected a database host: source_system = * AND host = “database” AND zero_impact != "true"

❗️

Reserved words

Certain words in BigPanda are reserved when using BPQL. When using these words to build environments, the system builds the environment according to the reserved meaning and is not able to treat them as a custom alert tag.

• zero_impact = if false this means the environment has no incidents with the acknowledged or maintenance status
• status = the current status of the incident. Possible statuses are: Critical, Warning, Unknown, Ok, or Acknowledged
• severity = the max status reached by alerts in an incident. Possible statuses are: Critical, Warning, Unknown, Ok, or Acknowledged
• source_system = the ID of the source system that produced the incident

To learn more about composing using BPQL, please see the BigPanda Query Language (BPQL) documentation.

Edit Environments

Environments can be edited to better fit the needs of your changing organization and processes.

To edit an environment:

1. Hover over a desired Environment's name in the Environments pane.
2. Click the Three Dots icon.
3. Select Edit.
4. Make any desired edits to the environment settings or filters.
5. Click Save Environment to finalize the changes.

The environment is updated to show incidents that meet the new settings. If the new settings add incidents to the environment that would trigger an AutoShare, the incidents will be shared.

Delete Environments

If an environment becomes irrelevant or is clouding your view, it can be deleted at any time. Environments are deleted from the Environments pane.

To delete an environment:

1. Hover over a desired Environment's name in the Environments pane.
2. Click the Three Dots icon.
3. Select Delete.
4. A confirmation prompt will appear, select Delete Environment to confirm the deletion, or Cancel to return to the Incidents tab.

The environment is permanently deleted from BigPanda.

❗️

Caution when deleting

Environments are used in AutoShare, Analytics, and Dashboards, so it is best practice to ensure that an environment is not being used in any process before deleting it.

Manage Environment Groups

Your BigPanda environment groups can be customized to better fit the organizational structure and processes of your organization. Create, edit, or delete environment groups to help your teams stay focused on the most relevant information to them.

Environment groups are managed from the Environments pane.

Assign an Environment to an Environment Group

Environments can be assigned or reassigned to environment groups at any time. Each environment can only be assigned to a single group at a time.

To assign an environment to an environment group:

1. In the Environments pane, hover over a desired environment name.
2. Click the Three Dots icon.
3. Select Edit.
4. Under the Apply to group dropdown, select the desired group name.
5. Select Save Environment.

The environment now appears under the group heading in the left pane and can be hidden or shown with the environment group.

Create a New Environment Group

A new environment group can be created at any time. New environment groups appear at the bottom of the environments list in the environments pane and cannot be reordered.

To create a new environment group:

1. At the top of the Environments pane on the left, click the plus sign icon.
2. From the menu, select New Group.
3. Enter a Group Name.
4. Select Create Group.

The environment group now appears at the bottom of the Environments pane and is available in the Apply to group dropdown when creating or editing environments.

👍

Group order

In BigPanda, Groups appear on the left panel in the order they were created and cannot be rearranged.

Edit an Environment Group

To edit an environment group:

1. In the Environments pane, hover over a desired environment group name.
2. Click the Three Dots icon.
3. Select Edit.
4. Make any desired edits to the environment Group Name.
5. Click Update Group to finalize the changes.

The environment group will automatically update in the Environments pane and the Apply to group dropdown.

Delete an Environment Group

Environment groups can be deleted at any time. Deleting an environment group does not delete the associated environments. All environments assigned to the group will be reassigned to the General environment group.

To delete an environment group:

1. In the Environments pane, hover over a desired environment group name.
2. Select the Three Dots icon.
3. Select Delete.
4. A confirmation prompt will appear, select Delete Group to confirm the deletion or Cancel to return to the Incidents tab.

The environment group is permanently deleted from BigPanda.

Example Environment Configuration

You can create Environments based on the different responsibilities within your Ops teams. This example demonstrates how to define an Environment for a DBA team that focuses on incidents for production databases and related analytics applications.

Define the DBA Team Environment

1. At the top of the screen, click the Incidents tab.
2. At the top of the left pane, click the plus sign icon.
3. From the menu, select New Environment.
4. In Environment Name, enter DBA.
5. In the Source field, select Nagios (ALL).
6. Click the Plus sign.
7. Select the tag, select the operator, and enter the value as listed in a row of the following table.
8. Repeat Steps 5 – 6 for each row in the table.

❗️

Filter conditions

These filter conditions are defined for a hypothetical sample environment. You can adapt the conditions as necessary to meet your infrastructure configuration and the needs of your teams.

8. Click Add Another to open a new source condition box.

9. In the Source field, select New Relic (ALL).

10. Click the Plus sign beneath the New Relic (ALL) source.

11. Select the tag, select the operator, and enter the value as listed in a row of the following table.

12. Repeat Steps 10 – 11 for each row in the table.

If the Advanced Editor has been enabled, you can also create this environment by navigating to the Advanced editor and entering:

• (source_system = /nagios\.._/ AND Host = /._db\.._/ AND Hostgroups != "staging" AND check != "keepalive" AND zero_impact != "true") OR (source_system = /new relic\.._/ AND Application = "Analytics" AND Description = /._ping._/ AND zero_impact != "true")

13. Review the Preview pane to ensure that the correct incidents are included.

14. Click Save Environment.

The environment now appears at the bottom of the environments list. The environment will update as new relevant incidents come in for your DBA team to review.

BigPanda Environments API

The BigPanda Environments API is able to pull environment details, and can create, update, and delete environments.

Once an environment has been created or edited using the Environments API, the Basic environment builder will no longer be available for that environment.

For more information about the Environments API, please see the Environments API reference page.

Next Steps

Learn more about viewing incidents in environments

Find your way around the BigPanda Settings page

Learn how to manage environments using the Environments API