Chapter 1. Introduction to Monitoring

In any enterprise, no matter how big or small, it is very important to monitor the health of all its components such as servers, network devices, databases, and so on, and make sure that things are working as intended. Monitoring is a critical part for any business that is dependent upon infrastructure. This can be done by giving signals to enable the necessary actions in case of any failures.

In a real production environment, monitoring can be very complex with many components and configurations. There might be different security zones, different ways in which servers are set up, or the same database might have been used in many different ways with servers listening to various service ports.

Before diving into setting up monitoring and logging for Hadoop, it is very important to understand the basics of monitoring, how it works, and some commonly used tools in the market. In Hadoop, we can monitor the resources, services, and also collect the metrics of various Hadoop counters. In this book, we will be looking at monitoring and metrics collection.

In this chapter, we will begin our journey by exploring the open source monitoring tools that we use in enterprises, and learn how to configure them.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter: