Chapter 10. Monitoring

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use a variety of tools to monitor and understand important events in the life cycle of your Cassandra cluster. We’ll look at some simple ways to see what’s going on, such as changing the logging levels and understanding the output.

Cassandra also features built-in support for Java Management Extensions (JMX), which offers a rich way to monitor your Cassandra nodes and their underlying Java environment. Through JMX, we can see the health of the database and ongoing events, and even interact with it remotely to tune certain values. JMX is an important part of Cassandra, and we’ll spend some time to make sure we know how it works and what exactly Cassandra makes available for monitoring and management with JMX. Let’s get started!

Logging

The simplest way to get a picture of what’s happening in your database is to just change the logging level to make the output more verbose. This is great for development and for learning what Cassandra is doing under the hood.

Cassandra uses the Simple Logging Facade for Java (SLF4J) API for logging, with Logback as the implementation.  SLF4J provides a facade over various logging frameworks such as Logback, Log4J, and Java’s built-in logger (java.util.logging). You can learn more about Logback at http://logback.qos.ch/.

By default, the Cassandra server log level is set at INFO, which doesn’t give you much detail about what work Cassandra is doing at any given time. It just outputs basic ...

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