Cassandra Database Monitor Configuration Guide on the Elven Platform

The Cassandra Monitor from the Elven Platform enables checks based on key queries in Cassandra. This feature helps configure continuous checks, define alerts, and set thresholds for automatic incident opening, ensuring you are quickly informed about any connectivity or performance issues.

Cassandra is a distributed, open-source NoSQL database management system known for its scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance. It is designed to handle large volumes of data distributed across multiple servers, maintaining performance even in highly distributed systems. Cassandra uses a table and column-based data model, allowing flexibility in storing semi-structured and structured data.

With features like multi-datacenter replication, tunable consistency, and support for fast reads and writes, Cassandra is widely used in large-scale applications such as social networks, e-commerce platforms, and real-time monitoring systems. It stands out for its ability to scale horizontally and its resilience, making it an ideal solution for environments that demand high availability and large-scale performance.

Accessing Cassandra Monitoring

• Navigate to the main menu and click on Services Hub.

• Under Database, select the Cassandra item.

Monitoring Configuration

Monitoring the availability of your services has never been easier. Start by giving a clear Resource Name to the resource you want to monitor, making it easier to identify. Then, adjust the Interval between checks and the Timeout for responses.

Select where the monitoring agent is located (Checkpoint Cloud) by choosing an existing Environment, or create a new one by clicking + Checkpoint. After this setup, enter the server address in the Host field and specify the Port. In User and Password, provide the username and password, which are the access credentials for the database.

Keep in mind that the Host field only accepts URLs; if you need to use an IP address, it must be created in a Secret to ensure the security and organization of the information.

Automatic Incident Opening

You can configure automatic incident opening to ensure a quick response to critical issues. To begin, define the incident severity, allowing you to prioritize according to urgency. Next, adjust the Check Interval, specifying the check frequency in seconds to continuously monitor the resource. This helps ensure you're always one step ahead, detecting problems as soon as they arise.

Additionally, select the team to be notified whenever an incident occurs and enable the "Enable to set up automatic incidents opening" option to ensure the configuration is active. With this setup, the platform automates incident management, making the response process faster and more efficient, without the need for manual intervention. This ensures your team is always ready to resolve any issue with speed and precision.

Maintenance Window

Maintenance Window is an essential feature for managing planned maintenance periods in your application. During this interval, checks are temporarily paused, preventing monitoring, alerts, and notifications from being triggered while you perform adjustments or updates. This allows maintenance to proceed smoothly, without generating unnecessary notifications or false alarms, ensuring your operations continue in an orderly fashion without unexpected interruptions in performance reports.

For example, imagine you need to update the payment system of an e-commerce platform, making backend adjustments such as installing new security certificates. To do this, you can configure a Maintenance Window for a specific time, such as 12/13/2024, from 14:00 to 14:30. During this period, the Elven Platform suspends checks, preventing the monitoring system from logging temporary failures or triggering false alerts. This way, you can make the necessary changes calmly, knowing that the monitoring system will not be affected during maintenance.

This approach ensures that updates are carried out in an organized manner, without impacting the user experience or generating unwanted notifications.

Application Opening Hours

You can also rely on the Application Opening Hours feature, which allows you to configure your application's operating hours. This functionality is essential for customizing monitoring based on the periods when your application is actually active, avoiding alerts and notifications outside of business hours. This makes monitoring more aligned with your business's real needs, ensuring more accurate reports and efficient management.

For example, imagine your application operates only from Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 18:00. You can configure Application Opening Hours to reflect this schedule by specifying the active days and time periods. With this setup, the Elven Platform automatically disables checks outside of these hours, preventing the logging of failures that don’t affect end users and avoiding unnecessary alerts.

This approach optimizes performance analysis, focusing only on relevant periods and providing a clearer view of your application's health during its operating hours.

Glossary of Technical Terms

Cassandra: An open-source, distributed NoSQL database management system designed to handle large volumes of data with scalability and high availability. Known for its ability to operate across multi-datacenter clusters, Cassandra uses a table-and-column-based model, allowing the storage of structured and semi-structured data with high performance. Widely adopted in large-scale systems such as social networks, e-commerce, and real-time monitoring, Cassandra is ideal for environments that require fault tolerance, configurable consistency, and efficient horizontal scalability, with support for globally distributed data.

Interval: The time interval between automatic checks performed during monitoring.

Timeout: The maximum time allowed for the monitoring system to receive a response from the monitored resource before registering a failure.

Checkpoint Cloud: The location where the monitoring agent is hosted, which can be a pre-existing environment or one created by the user.

Host: The URL address of the monitored resource. If an IP address is required, it should be stored in a Secret for enhanced security.

Secret: A resource used to store sensitive information, such as IP addresses or credentials, ensuring security and organization.

Enable to set up automatic incidents opening: An option that, when enabled, activates automatic incident opening upon detection of critical issues.

Severity: The level of criticality assigned to an incident, allowing it to be prioritized based on urgency.

Check Interval: The time interval, in seconds, for performing continuous checks on the monitored resource.

Maintenance Window: A feature that temporarily pauses monitoring, alerts, and notifications during planned maintenance periods.

Application Opening Hours: A configuration that defines the operating hours of the application, aligning monitoring with active periods and avoiding alerts outside those hours.