I finally got some time to do some house cleaning. One of my nagging low-hanging fruit jobs was to stop using jconsole as my monitor. I created a ganglia script to graph what is above. The image illustrated above I am showing all the Cassandra servers and their total row read stages completed in the last hour as a gauge. In essence I am graphing the delta of the change between ganglia script runs.

How I have it set up is:

All data exposed by JMX to produce tpstats and cfstats is graphed via ganglia. The pattern for each graph is as follows

cass_{stat_class}_{key}

stat_class - tpc, tpp, tpa means complete, pending, active respectively
key - would be message deserialization for instance.

For column family stats I graph the keyspace stats as well as the specific column family …