A snitch determines the data center and rack configuration for the cluster. Every node can be configured to use a certain type of snitch. This configuration is available as endpoint_snitch within the cassandra.yaml file.
For single data center setups, it is common to leave the snitch to a default value of SimpleSnitch. For multi-data center setups, there are a bunch of snitches to select from depending on the networking setup and other factors.
PropertyFileSnitch reads the network configuration from the cassandra-topology.properties file. This file contains the list of nodes within the cluster and information about which data center and rack each node belongs to. The file might look like this:
From this file, we can ascertain that ...
