Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/DataStax/cassandra-tools-and-distributed-administration-jeffrey-berger-knewton-c-summit-2016 | At Knewton we operate across five different VPCs a total of 29 clusters, each ranging from 3 nodes to 24 nodes. For a team of three to maintain this is not herculean, however good tools to diagnose issues and gather information in a distributed manner are vital to moving quickly and minimizing engineering time spent. The database team at Knewton has been successfully using a combination of Ansible and custom open sourced tools to maintain and improve the Cassandra deployment at Knewton. I will be talking about several of these tools and giving examples of how we are using them. Specifically I will discuss the cassandra-tracing tool, which analyzes the contents of the system_traces keyspace, and the cassandra-stat tool, which gives real-time output of the operations of a cassandra cluster. Distributed administration with ad-hoc Ansible will also be covered and I will walk through examples of using these commands to identify and remediate clusterwide issues. About the Speaker Jeffrey Berger Lead Database Engineer, Knewton Dr. Jeffrey Berger is currently the lead database engineer at Knewton, an education tech startup in NYC. He joined the tech scene in NYC in 2013 and spent two years working with MongoDB, becoming a certified MongoDB administrator and a MongoDB Master. He received his Cassandra Administrator certification at Cassandra Summit 2015. He holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Penn State and spent several years working on high energy nuclear interactions.