In this lunch, Johnny will show us how easy it is to start monitoring your Cassandra cluster in minutes. He will explain the various aspects and features of Cassandra that need to be monitored, how to do it, and most importantly why! Approaches for backups and Cassandra repairs will be discussed and explored in detail. Learn how AxonOps significantly reduces the complexity and overhead when looking after Cassandra and ensures your Cassandra cluster is reliable and resilient. Experienced developer, DevOps, architect, and AxonOps co-founder, Johnny Miller, has worked with a wide variety of companies – from small start-ups to large enterprises. He has been working with Cassandra for many years and has a deep understanding of the challenges facing modern companies looking to adopt Apache Cassandra.

1. © 2022 AxonOps. All rights reserved. https://axonops.com
Apache Cassandra Monitoring
Made Easy with AxonOps
Johnny Miller
Co-Founder
AxonOps
info@axonops.com
https:/
/axonops.com

2. © 2022 AxonOps. All rights reserved. https://axonops.com
What is Apache Cassandra?
▪ database
▪ highly available and fault tolerant
▫ data center/region aware
▫ rack/availability zone aware
▫ masterless with no single point of failure
▪ low latency / high throughput
▪ linearly scalable
▪ Open-sourced in 2008, became a top-level Apache
project in 2010

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Adoption
https:/
/db-engines.com/

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Use Cases
▪ internet of things
▪ social media
▪ telecommunications
▪ online streaming media
▪ online advertising
▪ messaging
▪ security/fraud
▪ travel
▪ financial services

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Masterless
Architecture
Scalable
Highly Available &
Fault Tolerant
Highly
Performant
Tunable
Consistency
Multi-DC/Region/
Cloud
Open Source
Multiple Use
Cases

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Why do I love Cassandra?

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However, it is not magic!
▪ Like any DB, it needs to be
▫ Monitored
▫ Managed
▫ Backed-up
▫ Secured

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Monitoring &
Managing
Cassandra

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nodetool
▪ Swiss Army Knife for Cassandra
▪ Has many options - steep learning curve
▪ Invokes a java process - speaks to Cassandra
over JMX

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nodetool - demo
▪

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Metrics exposed as JMX MBeans

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logs

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Backups
▪ nodetool snapshot - snapshot of the Cassandra
data at a specific point in time
▪ commit logs

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Snapshot Triggers
▪ nodetool snapshot command
▪ Dropping keyspace/table - cassandra.yaml -
auto_snapshot: true
▪ Incremental backups - cassandra.yaml -
incremental_backups: false
▪ Snapshot before compaction - cassandra.yaml -
snapshot_before_compaction

15. © 2022 AxonOps. All rights reserved. https://axonops.com
Point in Time Recovery
▪ Essentially commitlog archiving and restoration
mechanism built into Cassandra
▪ Configuration file is located at:
/etc/cassandra/commitlog_archiving.properties
▪ Restore time is configured in this file
▪ Snapshotting is sufficient for most
circumstances. Only required if an exact
point-in-time-recovery is required.

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Repair
▪ The nodetool repair command repairs inconsistencies
across all of the replicas for a given range of data.
▫ Sequential, parallel, or all DC parallel
▫ Repair specific DC
▫ Full, partition range, or subrange
▫ Concurrency - number of concurrent repairs across multiple
tables - maximum 4
▫ Specific keyspaces / tables
▪ Must be run regularly on your Cassandra Cluster

17. © 2022 AxonOps. All rights reserved. https://axonops.com
Operating System
▪ Storage
▪ Network
▪ IO
▪ Time (NTP)
▪ Plus more…..

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Why AxonOps?

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Metrics & Logs
▪ Prometheus
▪ Grafana
▪ Datadog
▪ Metricbeat
▪ Graphite
▪ Elasticsearch
▪ Etc.. etc..

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Repairs
▪ nodetool
▪ Cassandra reaper
Bash script
▪ Etc.. etc..

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Backups
▪ nodetool snapshot
▪ bash script
▪ Medusa
▪ Etc..etc..

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Lots of tools, lots of complexity and
lots of cost!

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AxonOps
▪ AxonOps is a Cassandra
management tool hosted in the
cloud by us.
▪ It provides observability, alerting, backups, and repair -
everything you need to manage your Apache
Cassandra clusters successfully.
▪ Built by Cassandra Experts with years of actual hands-on
experience.

24. © 2022 AxonOps. All rights reserved. https://axonops.com
AxonOps is simple
▪ Install a single agent and that’s it - all the
logs, metrics and tools necessary to manage
Cassandra in production.
▫ Pre-configured dashboards
▫ Full backup management
▫ Intelligent and Adaptive Repairs
▫ Rich suite of integrations with tools like ServiceNOW,
Slack, PagerDuty, Teams etc..
▫ Plus more!!
▪

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Demo

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Additional Resources
▪ https:/
/axonops.com
▪ https:/
/docs.axonops.com
▪ https:/
/axonops.com/slack
▪ https:/
/cassandra.apache.org
▪ https:/
/cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest/
▪ https:/
/github.com/apache/cassandra

28. © 2022 AxonOps. All rights reserved. https://axonops.com