In my previous blog, I wrote at length about the complexities of running a data cloud in production. This logical data set, spread across many nodes, requires a whole new set of tools and methodologies to run and maintain. Today we’ll look at one of the biggest challenges in managing a data cloud – monitoring.
Database monitoring used to be easy in the days before data clouds. Datasets were stored in a single large database, and there were hundreds of off-the-shelf products available to monitor the performance of that database. When problems occurred, one had simply to open up the monitoring tool and look at a set of graphs and metrics to diagnose the problem.
There are no off-the-shelf tools for monitoring a data cloud, however. There’s no easy way to get a comprehensive view of your entire data cloud, let alone diagnose problems and monitor performance. Database monitoring solutions simply don’t cut it in this kind of environment. So how do we monitor the performance of our data cloud? I’ll tell you what I did.