Using Cassandra Exporter without Prometheus

Question

I'm trying to get a few metrics from a Cassandra node that has a Cassandra Exporter running on it (https://github.com/criteo/cassandra_exporter/). I don't want to go into the details, but using Prometheus is not an option at this time.

I'd like to access the data with HTTP requests or something similar. With a simple HTTP Get I can access all the cached information, but I would like to do more sophisticated operations on this, such as filtering for certain messages. Is there a way to do this? I could not find any information on this. Or do I have to get the entire log and then do filtering operations on my local machine?

I'm using the jmx-exporter tag because cassandra-exporter used to be a fork of it and I couldn't find a more fitting tag.

Answer 1

I would suggest to use telegraf + jolokia. It is easy to setup and it will expose the metrics via HTTP.

I wrote a post about it (in my case I saved the result into InfluxDb and used it in Grafana), it might be useful: cassandra-performance-monitoring-by-using-jolokia-agent-telegraf-influxdb-and-grafana

Answer 2

Using Prometheus exporters without the Prometheus server itself is a perfectly valid approach if you don't care about historical data and just want to get an immediate snapshot of metrics (state of the system) or make a recording of some short period manually. One of the instruments you might look at is Metricat application (https://metricat.dev/), it allows you to have filters by metrics and make recordings of how metrics change in time during period of your interest.