Managing a large Cassandra cluster can be a pain in the neck with installations over hundreds of machines and across multiple data centers comprising test, staging, prod, and other environments with multiple keyspaces running on virtual machines with a cloud providers' hardware getting compromised more often than you would expect. Fortunately, people at DataStax have built OpsCenter.

OpsCenter is a web application that takes care of all operation-related tasks from a user-friendly user interface. It smartly uses Cassandra's JMX calls and operations commands to perform the task. On top of this, you can use it to monitor alerts, performance reviews, and diagnosis. We will see OpsCenter in more detail in the next chapter.

For a small cluster setup (say, under 25 nodes), it is may be simpler to stick with simple automation based on nodetool and perhaps shell or Python script. It will keep the administration simple.