rickysaltzer/hannibal

Hannibal is a tool to help monitor and maintain HBase-Clusters that are configured for manual splitting.

While HBase provides metrics to monitor overall cluster health via JMX or Ganglia, it lacks the ability to monitor single regions in an easy way. This information is essential when your cluster is configured for manual splits, especially when the data growth is not uniform.

This tool tries to fill that gap by answering the following questions:

How well are regions balanced over the cluster?
How well are the regions split for each table?
How do regions evolve over time?

Requirements & Limitations

Java 6 JDK is required on the machine where this tool is built.

You will also need a browser with SVG-Support to display Hannibal's graphs.

HBase Compatibilty

Hannibal currently supports HBase versions 0.90 to 0.94. Be sure to set the environment-variable HANNIBAL_HBASE_VERSION for your version, as described in the Quickstart-section. The Scala-sources are currently compiled with Cloudera's HBase versions wherever possible, you can try to alter the version in project/Build.scala if you wish to.

Video Tutorial

There is also a tutorial video on [YouTube][yt], that shows how to install and use Hannibal for HBase 0.90. [yt]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4Kto41a5kE&hd=1

Quickstart

Grab the sources from github:

$ git clone https://github.com/sentric/hannibal.git
$ cd hannibal

Set the Environmentvariable HANNIBAL_HBASE_VERSION according to your HBase version. For example for HBase 0.92 do:
```
$ export HANNIBAL_HBASE_VERSION=0.92
```
Other possible values are "0.90" or "0.94"
Copy conf/hbase-site.template.xml to conf/hbase-site.xml and adjust it.
Build the project using the build script inside the root folder of the project:
```
$ ./build
```
Run the start script inside the root folder of the project:
```
$ ./start
```

The first time you build, sbt will fetch all dependencies needed to build and run the the application. It will take a few minutes to build.

When the application has started, you can access the web UI at: http://localhost:9000

Please note that history data about regions is only collected while the application is running, it will need to run for some time until the region detail graphs fill up.

For information about the usage, check out the Usage page on our Wiki.

How to display compactions

HBase 0.90.x's API doesn't allow you to query information on running compactions directly, so what we do is to parse the RegionServers' log files directly, which are available through the service interface. HBase 0.92 allows you to query compactions directly, but we still collect compactions using the logfile-parsing technique, because this way we don't miss any short running compactions. The downside is that this doesn't work out of the box for all HBase clusters because either, the path-pattern or the date-pattern can differ from system to system. Another problem can be, that the compaction-information isn't logged at all in your setup, because your LogLevel is set too high.

If you run into problems with the the compaction-metrics, you should check the following parameters in conf/application.conf.

1. compactions.logfile-path-pattern

The default of the logfile-path-pattern is

compactions.logfile-path-pattern = "(?i)\"/logs/(.*regionserver.*[.].*)\""

The defaults should work for most setups in distributed mode. For standalone mode you will need change the pattern to

compactions.logfile-path-pattern = (?i)\"/logs/(.*master.*[.].*)\"

If you are still unsure about the correct path-pattern, you can get a hint for the correct pattern by looking at your log-listing http://<<some-regionserver>>:60030/logs/.

2. compactions.logfile-date-format

The default logfile-date-format is

compactions.logfile-date-format = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss,SSS"

You can figure out the correct date-format by looking inside a logfile within your log-listing at http://<<some-regionserver>>:60030/logs/

3. compactions.set-loglevels-on-startup

Informations about compactions are logged by HBase with INFO-Level, so the log-level for your HBase-Regionservers need to be set at least to INFO.

Hannibal can set the log level to INFO for you, just edit conf/application.conf and set

compactions.set-loglevels-on-startup = true

If this doesn't work for you, you should try to manually change the loglevel on your regionservers.

More Information

More information about the tool can be found in the Wiki

Additional Features

If you need additional features please get in touch with us, maybe we can work something out.

License

Hannibal is released under MIT License, see LICENSE for details.

Contributors

This tool is developed at Sentric by: Nils Kübler and Jiayong Ou

With help from:

rickysaltzer / hannibal