Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7. Monitoring
Monitoring is the key to provide reliable service. For distributed software, monitoring be-
comes more important and more complex. Fortunately, Cassandra has an excellent tool
built in for monitoring. It is called
nodetool
. Apart from this, there are third-party tools
to monitor Cassandra.
The purpose of monitoring is to be able to catch a problem before or as soon as it happens
and resolve it. Therefore, this chapter will be a mix of monitoring, management (it comes
with monitoring tools), and very quick troubleshooting tips. It familiarizes you with the
Java Management Extension
(
JMX
) interface that Cassandra provides and then moves
on to accessing it via JConsole. Cassandra's
nodetool
—the application to monitor and
administer Cassandra—is discussed in detail. Further, DataStax OpsCenter (the community
version), which is an excellent web-based tool that stores performance history, is discussed.
Nagios is another tool that can be used to monitor not only Cassandra but also the complete
infrastructure with heterogeneous components. Nagios is a veteran monitoring tool. It is a
pretty simple, intuitive, extendable, and robust tool. It provides monitoring along with e-
mail notifications.
