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# Operations

This section covers operational activities related to accessing, monitoring, scaling, and backing up Squirro.

## Accessing Servers

For information on accessing the Squirro Application as well as Squirro Servers (including Redis and MariaDB), see [Accessing Servers](accessing-servers.md#admin-access).

This includes information on logins, access, instances, and databases.

## Cluster Status

The cluster status is observable from within the Squirro UI in your browser.

See [Cluster Status](cluster-status.md#admin-cluster-status) to learn how to view log files, the monitoring plugin, Elasticsearch status, ingester status, and scheduled tasks.

## Monitoring

To learn more about locating and accessing log files, service monitoring, and evaluating memory and disk usage, see [Monitoring](monitoring.md#admin-monitoring).

## Observability and Telemetry

Squirro uses OpenTelemetry to produce traces, logs, and metrics about how the platform behaves at runtime. To learn how OpenTelemetry is integrated into Squirro and how to turn it on, see the [Observability and Telemetry](observability.md#admin-observability) page.

To connect Squirro to a third-party observability platform such as Grafana, Jaeger, or Langfuse, see the [Connecting to an Observability Platform](observability-integrations.md#admin-observability-integrations) page.

## Activity Tracking

For information on data collected as part of user interactions with Squirro, see [Activity Tracking](activity-tracking.md#admin-operations-activity-tracking).

## Audit Logging

For information on audit logging, which provides a structured way to track and monitor user activities for security and compliance purposes, see [Audit Logging](audit-logging.md#admin-operations-audit-logging).

## Managing Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is used for storage nodes where indexed data is persisted. To learn more about tools to support Elasticsearch operations, monitoring, and troubleshooting, see [Elasticsearch Management](managing-elasticsearch.md#admin-managing-elasticsearch).

For information on reindexing Elasticsearch, see [Reindexing Elasticsearch](elasticsearch-reindex.md#admin-reindex-elasticsearch).

## Services

Squirro consists of several services that are started and stopped individually. To learn more, including how to interact with services and run Squirro Services in Python, see [Services](services.md#admin-services).

## How Squirro Scales

To learn how Squirro can scale from a single host to a massive multi-node cluster, see [How Squirro Scales](how-scales.md#admin-how-scales).

## Business Continuity Planning

To learn how Squirro can be run as a clustered application across multiple hosts to provide high availability and horizontal scaling, see [Business Continuity Planning](bcp.md#admin-bcp).

## Backing Up and Restoring Databases

For information on backing up and restoring the Squirro MySQL/MariaDB database, see [Database Backup and Restore](backup-restore.md#admin-backup-restore).

## Fixing MySQL/MariaDB Replication

If a replication fails on a multi-node Squirro deployment, see [Fixing MySQL/MariaDB Replication](fixing-replication.md#admin-fixing-replication) for more information.

## Deploying the Plumber service in a Docker container

To learn how to deploy the `plumber` service in a Docker container, as opposed to the default option of running it directly on the host, refer to the section [Deploying the Plumber service in a Docker container](plumber-in-container.md#plumber-in-container).