We’re happy to announce that our first release of the Instaclustr Health Page is now live on the Instaclustr console.

Instaclustr’s Managed Service has long in included regular manual health checks of cluster to advise customer of issues with their use of Cassandra that have the potential to impact future stability. We’ve long wanted to make this information available to customers directly on our console and have been steadily enhancing our monitoring architecture to give us the behind the scenes capability we needed to deliver this.

The Health Page supplements our monitoring capability by looking at the long-term health of your cluster and highlighting areas that, while not currently causing visible issues, have the potential to cause issues in the future. The cluster health page captures that key customer configuration issues that we see causing stability and performance issues with Cassandra in production:

• Disk Usage: running out of disk is a bad thing. We recommended keep disk usage in normal operations at 70% or less.
• Partition Size: overly large partitions (we use 10MB and the warning threshold and 100MB as the alert threshold) often cause latency and stability issues with Cassandra.
• Replication Factor: we require a minimum replication factor of 3 for SLAs and a replication factor of 1 is a high risk of data loss.
• Replication Strategy: NetworkTopologyStrategy is recommended for production use (and required for SLAs). Using SimpleStrategy can impact availability in some scenarios and preclude future flexibility of maintenance operations (migrating to a new DC for upgrades, etc).
• Tombstones to Live Cells: high ratios of tombstones in reads can cause significant latency.

This page is a further step in giving customers direct visibility in to the key information they need to manage their clusters without being a Cassandra expert. The linked help pages provide a detail explanation of the alerts and actions that can be taken to rectify them.

We’re excited about this new functionality and we hope be find it useful. If you have any feedback please feel free email me at [email protected] (or maybe say hello at Cassandra Summit).