To get a metric, such as DownEnpointCount in the org.apache.Cassandra.net package, the get command can be used as follows. This gives a count of nodes that are down via the CLI, which in turn can be used for alerting through a cron job.
Which is your most-used metric in Cassandra?
get -b org.apache.cassandra.net:type=FailureDetector DownEndpointCount
The output of the preceding command is as follows: