HBase is a distributed, NoSQL, open-source database, initially conceived as an open-source alternative to Google’s proprietary BigTable. Originally, HBase was part of the Hadoop project, but was eventually spun off as a subproject. Given this legacy, it is not surprising that most often HBase is deployed on top of a Hadoop cluster (it used HDFS as its underlying storage), however a case study suggests that it can run on top of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) as well. These days HBase is used by companies such as Adobe, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo – and many others to process large amounts of data in real time, since it is ideally placed to store the input and/or the output of MapReduce jobs.
Monitoring HBase with Monitis and JMX
Like most products written in Java, both HBase and Hadoop contain built-in JMX instrumentation, which theoretically allows us to use any JMX client to view their performance metrics. Naturally, Monitis has just what the doctor ordered – a generic JMX agent that can be configured to monitor any JMX-enabled process through a point-and-click web interface.
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