It is vital to monitor the status of an HBase cluster to ensure that it is operating as expected. The challenge of monitoring a distributed system, besides taking the case of each server separately, is that you will also need to look at the overall status of the cluster.
HBase inherits its monitoring APIs from Hadoop's metrics framework. It exposes a large amount of metrics, giving the insight information of the cluster. These metrics are subsequently configured to expose other monitoring systems, such as Ganglia or OpenTSDB, to gather and make them visible through graphs. Ganglia/OpenTSDB graphs help us understand the insight of the cluster, both for a single server and the entire cluster.
Graphs are good for getting an overview of the historical status, but we also need a mechanism to check the current state of the cluster, and send us notifications or take some automatic actions if the cluster has some problem. A good solution for this kind of monitoring task is Nagios. Nagios...