The big data era is characterized by the ever-increasing velocity and volume of data. In order to store and analyze the ever-growing data, the operational footprint of data stores and Hadoop have also grown over time. (As per a recent report from IDC, the spending on big data infrastructure is expected to reach $41.5 billion by 2018.) The clusters comprise several thousands of nodes. The high performance of such clusters is vital for delivering the best user experience and productivity of teams. The performance of such clusters is often limited by slow/bad nodes. Finding slow nodes in large clusters is akin to finding a needle in a haystack; hence, manual identification of slow/bad nodes is not practical. To this end, we developed a novel statistical technique to automatically detect slow/bad nodes in clusters comprising hundreds to thousands of nodes. We modeled the problem as a classification problem and employed a simple, yet very effective, distance measure to determine slow/bad nodes. The key highlights of the proposed technique are the following: # Robustness against anomalies (note that anomalies may occur, for example, due to an ad-hoc heavyweight job on a Hadoop cluster) # Given the varying data characteristics of different services, no one model fits all. Consequently, we parameterized the threshold used for classification The proposed technique works well with both hourly and daily data, and has been in use in production by multiple services. This has not only eliminated manual investigation efforts, but has also mitigated the impact of slow nodes, which used to get detected after several weeks/months of lag! We shall walk the audience through how the techniques are being used with REAL data.