Application developers often face the challenge of debugging issues that arise only in production environments due to the absence of production data in testing. This guide demonstrates using a service mesh, specifically Kuma, within a Kubernetes cluster to safely mirror production data to development applications, enabling better debugging and production-proof releases. The process involves installing Kuma and related applications, such as Kong Gateway and mockbin.org, to manage ingress traffic and service versions. By configuring Kuma's observability stack and metrics backend with Prometheus and Grafana, developers can track traffic flow and mirror production traffic to a development version without affecting the live environment. This setup allows for enhanced troubleshooting by utilizing production data in a controlled development space, aiding in identifying and resolving issues that are otherwise difficult to reproduce.