[Hawkular-dev] managing cassandra cluster

[John Sanda]

To date we haven’t really done anything by way of managing/monitoring the Cassandra cluster. We need to monitor Cassandra in order to know things like:

* When additional nodes are needed
* When disk space is low
* When I/O is too slow
* When more heap space is needed

Cassandra exposes a lot of metrics. I created HWKMETRICS-448. It briefly talks about collecting metrics from Cassandra. In terms of managing the cluster, I will provide a few concrete examples that have come up recently in OpenShift.

Scenario 1: User deploys additional node(s) to reduce the load on cluster
After the new node has bootstrapped and is running, we need to run nodetool cleanup on each node (or run it via JMX) in order to remove keys/data that each each node no longer owns; otherwise, disk space won’t be freed up. The cleanup operation can potentially be resource intensive as it triggers compactions. Given this, we probably want to run it one node at a time. Right now the user is left to do this manually.

Scenario 2: User deploys additional node(s) to get replication and fault tolerance
I connect to Cassandra directly via cqlsh and update replication_factor. I then need to run repair on each node can be tricky because 1) it is resource intensive, 2) can take a long time, 3) prone to failure, and 4) Cassandra does not give progress indicators.

Scenario 3: User sets up regularly, scheduled repair to ensure data is consistent across cluster
Once replication_factor > 1, repair needs to be run on a regular basis. More specifically it should be run within gc_grace_seconds which is configured per table and defaults to 10 days. The data table in metrics has reduced gc_grace_seconds to 1 day and probably reduce it to zero since it is append-only. The value for gc_grace_seconds might vary per table based on access patterns, which means the frequency of repair should vary as well.


There has already been some discussion of these things for Hawkular Metrics in the context of OpenShift. It applies to all of Hawkular Services as well. Initially I was thinking about building some management components directly in metrics, but it probably makes more sense as a separate, shared component (or components) that can be reused in both stand alone metrics in OpenShift and a full Hawkular Services deployment in MiQ for example.

We are already running into these scenarios in OpenShift and probably need to start putting something in place sooner rather than later.