DataStax (http://www.datastax.com) is the leading company that provides commercial support for Cassandra. At the time of writing of this book, DataStax claimed to employ more than 90 percent of Cassandra committers. DataStax provides an easy-to-use, web-based utility—OpsCenter—that is little more than a GUI wrapper over Cassandra's JMX instrumentation. OpsCenter provides a clean, simple, and intuitive interface to manage and monitor a Cassandra cluster. This section will briefly go over OpsCenter.
DataStax provides two versions of OpsCenter: an enterprise version and a community version. The enterprise version has more features, official support, and is paid. The community version can be downloaded and used for free in a production environment. You may download and evaluate the enterprise version for free for development purposes. In this section, we will briefly go over installing, configuring, monitoring...