DataStax Enterprise OpsCenter
Large-Scale Operations... on Autopilot
Make your database management and monitoring as simple as the push of a button to increase operational simplicity and productivity and reduce operational overhead.
Operational Simplicity
Eliminate operational headaches with automatic backups, reduced manual operations, and rapid performance issue detection.
Clear Visibility
Easily spot outliers and performance bottlenecks via customized dashboards with real-time and historical system metrics.
Enterprise-Ready For Anything
Automatic failover and fine-grained roles and permissions ensure always-on, integrated, and secure management and monitoring.
Announcing OpsCenter 6.5
Announcing OpsCenter 6.5 DataStax OpsCenter is an easy-to-use visual management and monitoring solution enabling administrators, architects, and developers to quickly provision, monitor, and maintain DataStax Enterprise (DSE) clusters, which are built on the best distribution of Apache Cassandra™. Today, I am pleased to announce the general availability of DataStax OpsCenter 6.5, fully supporting DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 6. Let me provide a quick tour of some of the enhancements found in OpsCenter 6.5. Introduction to OpsCenter Apache Cassandra has made great strides as a technology since its initial 2008 release, being deployed by companies to power their mission-critical applications. But as we know, with any distributed system, management can be difficult. DataStax OpsCenter is the key piece to the tricky management puzzle, helping to surface critical issues and solving others that you couldn’t see with just open source Apache Cassandra. From being notified of best practices, automating backups, or quickly understanding the health of your deployment, OpsCenter makes your management and monitoring push-button simple. In this blog, we’ll see what OpsCenter 6.5 offers to further simplify your operational needs. Upgrade Service Maintaining and upgrading databases can be a daunting task. At DataStax, we understand this and want to help you. As a sequel to the successful launch of the OpsCenter LifeCycle Manager Deploy feature, the Upgrade Service allows you to seamlessly perform patch [1] upgrades of DSE clusters without sacrificing the robustness, simplicity, or peace of mind. The initial release will allow you to perform DSE patch version upgrades, a more frequently required operation than major version upgrades. This release has several key features to simplify your upgrade experience: Simple and Flexible upgrade options Improved robustness and auditability Optimal default cluster settings Fig 1: OpsCenter Upgrade Feature NodeSync Service DSE NodeSync automatically and continuously synchronizes replicas of designated keyspaces and tables of a cluster as a background process. Unlike the Repair Service, the NodeSync Service does not build a Merkle tree for comparisons and stream differences for compaction. Rather, it incrementally scans a token range, compares data one page at a time, and sends data over the standard write path. OpsCenter provides a window for you to view NodeSync task statuses and take corrective measures. With the click of a button, OpsCenter allows you to enable or disable NodeSync on tables and keyspaces. Furthermore, as an admin, you will also be able to drill down and view the details at a per-table level. This allows for a much more flexible way to view the tasks, understand which tables are not being synchronized before the gc_grace_seconds period, and take corrective measures to fix the issue. For more details, refer to our documentation to see all the features that improve operator visibility. Fig 2: NodeSync Service New DSE Advanced Performance Metrics DSE 6 ships with a new suite of advanced performance optimizations and tools, called DSE Advanced Performance. In version 6, the new thread-per-core feature significantly boosts out-of-the-box performance for both read and write operations. The enhanced performance comes from a slick architectural design, which aims at having a non-blocking thread per CPU core, eliminating the need to coordinate with other cores and executing its assigned work at the maximum possible speed. To further support this functionality, OpsCenter 6.5 adds thread-per-core metrics to enable users to assess the health of the DSE nodes and identify performance bottlenecks. We will continue to enhance our support for thread-per-core and add many more functionalities in upcoming releases to improve operator efficiency. Fig 3: Thread per core (TPC) Metrics Support for DSE 6 OpsCenter 6.5 fully supports DSE 6 to provision, manage, and monitor your DSE clusters. We’ve also added support for new features such as AlwaysOn SQL that’s in DSE Analytics. In addition to all of the above goodness, we’ve spent a lot of time focussing on general product stability improvements. Fig 4: Always on SQL Conclusion In summary, this latest version of OpsCenter gives you with a wealth of new features and enhancements that make it even easier to provision and monitor DSE clusters. For more information on OpsCenter 6.5, see our online documentation. To try OpsCenter 6.5 in your own environment, download a copy today and be sure to let us know what you think. DataStax is a registered trademark of DataStax, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. Apache Cassandra and Cassandra are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation or its subsidiaries in Canada, the United States and/or other countries. [1] For example: DSE 5.0.7 to DSE 5.0.10 or DSE 5.1.2 to DSE 5.1.4
Simplifying Data Management
DataStax OpsCenter is an easy-to-use visual management and monitoring solution for DataStax Enterprise (DSE), the always-on data layer for real-time applications. With OpsCenter, you can quickly provision, upgrade, monitor, backup/restore, and manage your DSE clusters with little to no expertise. OpsCenter provides the ability to manage clusters that exist on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments spanning multiple data centers, reducing your operational and hardware costs and dramatically increasing your operational productivity.
Key Features
Resources
DSE NodeSync: Operational Simplicity at its Best
Introduction We’ve got something really special for administrators in DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 6: DSE NodeSync, designed with operational simplicity in mind, can virtually eliminate manual efforts required to run repair operations in a DataStax cluster. NodeSync To understand NodeSync, let’s talk about how we got here. One of the most important mechanisms for an administrator to run in Apache Cassandra™ is anti-entropy repair. Despite its name, repair is a process that should always be running in a cluster to ensure that data between nodes are consistent. The fundamentals of repair haven’t changed since it was initially introduced many years ago.It’s designed as a single-process bulk operation that continuously runs for a long time which means when failure occurs, you must begin the repair over again. Repair is also computationally and network intensive as it creates merkle trees and streams them between nodes. The longer classic repair runs, the more failure prone it is. To help mitigate some of these problems, complex tools were built to help orchestrate and add some structure and resiliency to repair. These tools try to split the repair process in multiple, more manageable pieces in an effort to improve operational simplicity, but in the end, these client-side tools were built to solve issues with a server-side mechanism. There’s only so much that can be done with tooling. Enter NodeSync: NodeSync is a ground-up rethinking of how we do entropy resolution in a DataStax cluster. Once you install DSE 6, NodeSync automatically starts running in the background. You simply tell it which keyspace or tables you’d like managed with NodeSync, and it handles the rest. No more compute-intensive tasks, no more complex tooling, just hands-off repair operations. Enabling nodesync on a table is as easy as an alter table command. NodeSync is designed to be simple and reliable. It divides the work it must complete into small tasks. These tasks are always tracked so it knows which data has been synchronized and which hasn’t. It also acts as a checkpoint mechanism so that if a node goes down, NodeSync knows exactly where to start again. NodeSync is also self-managing in that it will prioritize what to synchronize based on the last time the data was synced and whether it failed or not. Easily enable/disable nodesync on tables through OpsCenter While NodeSync is designed to be as hands-off as possible, we know how important it is for administrators to understand what’s happening in the cluster so we’ve also updated OpsCenter to monitor NodeSync progress for you. OpsCenter 6.5 lets you monitor NodeSync progress Conclusion We know our customers are going love NodeSync as it’s designed to make operations simpler with DataStax. Eliminating the need to orchestrate and manage repair means that administrators spend less time managing their DataStax clusters and more time doing other important tasks. To download DSE 6, and to get more information about NodeSync, please check out this page.
