Setting up proper monitoring of your infrastructure is the most recommended and the most disregarded suggestion to a development team, especially in startups where teams are small, resources are limited, and fast development is the only priority. It usually goes hand-in-hand with a reluctance to go through a painfully long mechanical process to set up a system. The importance of monitoring is best understood when a failure that could have been avoided occurs at a critical hour. Monitoring is an important tool for showing the reliability of a system.

With multiple tools in hand, you are knowledgeable enough to take your weapon of choice. Choose a tool or a set of tools that fits your environment. In many cases, having Nagios to monitor Cassandra, CPU, memory, ping, and disk statistics is good enough. Others may want a dedicated monitoring and management tool such as OpsCenter. There are still others who just write code that utilizes the JMX interface to monitor particular statistics. It is really up to you.

Cassandra is a big data store. What is the use of a big data store if you can't analyze it to extract interesting statistics? Fortunately, Cassandra provides hooks to smoothly integrate it with various Apache Hadoop projects such as Hadoop MapReduce, Pig, and Hive. It can be used as a corpus store for Solr. Cassandra plays well with low-latency stream processing tools such as Twitter Storm and can be seamlessly integrated with the Spark project (http://spark-project.org). The next chapter is all about using analytical tools with Cassandra.