Cassandra Integration

Cassandra Integration

Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source distributed NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Cassandra offers robust support for clusters spanning multiple datacenters, with asynchronous masterless replication allowing low latency operations for all clients.

1. Cassandra: This integration installs and configures Telegraf Jolokia2 input plugin to send Cassandra metrics to Wavefront. Telegraf is a light-weight server process capable of collecting, processing, aggregating, and sending metrics to a Wavefront proxy. Collecting Cassandra metric requires the installation of Jolokia java-jvm agent. Jolokia is a JMX-HTTP bridge giving an alternative to JSR-160 connectors. It is an agent based approach with support for many platforms. The Cassandra integration collects Cassandra / JVM metrics exposed as MBean’s attributes through jolokia REST endpoint.

2. Cassandra on Kubernetes: This integration uses K8ssandra which is a cloud native distribution of Apache Cassandra® that runs on Kubernetes. K8ssandra provides an ecosystem of tools to provide richer data APIs and automated operations alongside Cassandra. This explains the configuration of Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes to scrape Cassandra metrics using Prometheus.

In addition to setting up the metrics flow, this integration also installs dashboards:

• Cassandra
• Cassandra on Kubernetes

Here’s a dashboard displaying Cassandra metrics on Kubernetes:

To see a list of the metrics for this integration, select the integration from https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/tree/master/plugins/inputs.

Cassandra Setup

This integration uses the Cassandra input plugin for Telegraf. If you’ve already installed Telegraf on your servers, you can skip to Step 2.

Step 1. Install the Telegraf Agent

Log in to your Wavefront instance and follow the instructions in the Setup tab to install Telegraf and a Wavefront proxy in your environment. If a proxy is already running in your environment, you can select that proxy and the Telegraf install command connects with that proxy. Sign up for a free trial to check it out!

Step 2. Install Jolokia agent on your Cassandra server

1. Download the latest version of the Jolokia JVM-Agent JAR file jolokia-jvm-x.x.x.jar from the Jolokia web site and save it in /usr/share/java

2. Enable Jolokia agent in Cassandra

   1. Modify /etc/default/cassandra

      echo "export JVM_EXTRA_OPTS=\"-javaagent:/usr/share/java/jolokia-jvm-1.7.1.jar=port=8778,host=localhost\"" | sudo tee -a /etc/default/cassandra
      

   2. Alternatively, one can also enable the agent by modifying cassandra-env.sh

      Include the following line at the bottom of your cassandra-env.sh

      JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -javaagent:/usr/share/java/jolokia-jvm-1.7.1.jar=port=8778,host=localhost"
      

Here jolokia-jvm-1.7.1.jar is the latest version used for testing.

1. Restart cassandra

   sudo service cassandra restart
   

2. Verify that you can access Jolokia on port 8778 by running:

   curl http://localhost:8778/jolokia/
   

Step 3. Configure Cassandra Input Plugin

Create a file called cassandra.conf in /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d and enter the following snippet:

# Cassandra
[[inputs.jolokia2_agent]]
  # This is the context root used to compose the jolokia url
  ## List of cassandra servers exposing jolokia read service
  urls = ["http://localhost:8778/jolokia"]
  name_prefix = "cassandra2."

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "javaMemory"
    mbean = "java.lang:type=Memory"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "javaGarbageCollector"
    mbean = "java.lang:name=*,type=GarbageCollector"
    tag_keys = ["name"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "Cache"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,scope=*,type=Cache"
    tag_keys = ["name", "scope"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "Client"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,type=Client"
    tag_keys = ["name"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "ClientRequestMetrics"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,type=ClientRequestMetrics"
    tag_keys = ["name"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "ClientRequest"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,scope=*,type=ClientRequest"
    tag_keys = ["name", "scope"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "CommitLog"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,type=CommitLog"
    tag_keys = ["name"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "Compaction"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,type=Compaction"
    tag_keys = ["name"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "CQL"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,type=CQL"
    tag_keys = ["name"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "DroppedMessage"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,scope=*,type=DroppedMessage"
    tag_keys = ["name", "scope"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "FileCache"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,type=FileCache"
    tag_keys = ["name"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "ReadRepair"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,type=ReadRepair"
    tag_keys = ["name"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "Storage"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,type=Storage"
    tag_keys = ["name"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name  = "ThreadPools"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:name=*,path=*,scope=*,type=ThreadPools"
    tag_keys = ["name", "path", "scope"]
    field_prefix = "$1_"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name = "Table"
    mbean = "org.apache.cassandra.metrics:type=Table,keyspace=*,scope=*,name=*"
    tag_keys = ["keyspace", "scope", "name"]
    field_prefix = "$3_"

Step 4. Restart Telegraf

Run sudo service telegraf restart to restart your agent.

Cassandra on Kubernetes

This integration supports Cassandra deployment using K8ssandra provided by the Apache Cassandra community.

• Make sure that K8ssandra is deployed on your Kubernetes cluster. If not deployed already, you can deploy it by using K8ssandra-installation. Also, ensure to enable monitoring on your K8ssandra deployment .yaml.

    ### Sample command
    helm install -f k8ssandra-file.yaml k8ssandra-release -n k8ssandra-namespace
  

Configure the Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes

You can configure the Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes to scrape Cassandra metrics from Prometheus using prometheus_sources configuration.

If you do not already have the Wavefront Collector for Kubernetes installed, follow these instructions to add it to your cluster either by using Helm or performing Manual Installation.

Step 1. Edit the Wavefront Collector ConfigMap at runtime, and add the following snippet under Prometheus Sources.

   kubectl edit configmap wavefront-collector-config -n wavefront

Cassandra Config:

      ##########################################################################
      # Static source to collect Cassandra metrics via federated Prometheus server
      ##########################################################################
        
      prometheus_sources:
      - url: 'http://<prometheus-service-name>.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local:9090/federate?match[]={__name__=~"(mcac|stargate|jvm).*"}'
        prefix: 'cassandra.'
        httpConfig:
          bearer_token_file: '/var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/token'
          tls_config:
            ca_file: '/var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/ca.crt'
            insecure_skip_verify: true
  
        filters:
          metricAllowList:
          - 'cassandra.mcac.*'
          - 'cassandra.stargate.*'
          - 'cassandra.jvm.*'

NOTE: Update the prometheus-service-name and namespace params in the url as per your environment.

Cassandra

Cassandra on Kubernetes