Advanced Metrics Visualization Dashboarding With Apache Ambari

At Hortonworks, we work with hundreds of enterprises to ensure they get the most out of Apache Hadoop and the Hortonworks Data Platform. A critical part of making that possible is ensuring operators can quickly identify the root cause if something goes wrong.

A few weeks ago, we presented our vision for Streamlining Apache Hadoop Operations, and today we are pleased to announce the availability of Apache Ambari 2.2.2 which delivers on the first phase of this journey. With this latest update to Ambari, we can now put the most critical operational metrics in the hands of operators allowing them to:

• Gain a better understanding of cluster health and performance metrics through advanced visualizations and pre-built dashboards.
• Isolate critical metrics for core cluster services such as HDFS, YARN, and HBase.
• Reduce time to troubleshoot problems, and improve the level of service for cluster tenants.

Advanced Metrics Visualization & Dashboarding

Apache Hadoop components produce a lot of metric data, and the Ambari Metrics System (introduced about a year ago as part of Ambari 2.0) provides a scalable low-latency storage system for capturing those metrics.  Understanding which metrics to look at and why takes experience and knowledge.  To help simplify this process, and be more prescriptive in choosing the right metrics to review when problems arise, Grafana (a leading graph and dashboard builder for visualizing time-series metrics) is now included with Ambari Metrics. The integration of Grafana with Ambari brings the most important metrics front-and-center. As we continue to streamline the operational experiences of HDP, operational metrics play a key role, and Grafana provides a unique value to our operators.

How It Works

Grafana is deployed, managed and pre-configured to work with the Ambari Metrics service. We are including a curated set dashboards for core HDP components, giving operators at-a-glance views of the same metrics Hortonworks Support & Engineering review when helping customers troubleshoot complex issues.

Metrics displayed on each dashboard can be filtered by time, component, and contextual information (YARN queues for example) to provide greater flexibility, granularity and context.

Download Ambari and Get Started

We look forward to your feedback on this phase of our journey and encourage you to visit the Hortonworks Documentation site for information on how to download and get started with Ambari. Stay tuned for updates as we continue on the journey to streamline Apache Hadoop operations.