Datastax has discontinued the Community Edition of Datastax Cassandra, whose stack included OpsCenter.  As a result, Teamwork Cloud now runs using the Apache Cassandra 3.11 distribution.  The unavailability of Datastax OpsCenter has created a need to develop an alternative monitoring stack.  The upside is that we have now developed a monitoring stack which also monitors metrics directly from Teamwork Cloud on the same panel.

The monitoring stack is based on open source tooling.

Components

The following components constitute the monitoring node:

  • InfluxDB - time series database for collecting the metric data
  • Grafana - dashboard visualization layer
  • Jmxtrans - Collector to retrieve JMX metrics from remote hosts

The following components are deployed on each TWC/Cassandra node:

  • Telegraf - system metrics collector
  • Dropwizard metrics-graphite-3.1.2.jar - metrics publishing agent for Java

On a single node installation, all components may be installed on the same node.  On multi-node systems, the monitoring node components may be installed on one of the nodes (or on a separate machine), while the other components are deployed on each node.

The following sections provide instructions on how to setup the monitoring stack.