Ambari enables System Administrators to:
· Provision a Hadoop Cluster
o Ambari provides a step-by-step wizard for installing Hadoop services across any number of hosts.
o Ambari handles configuration of Hadoop services for the cluster.
· Manage a Hadoop Cluster
o Ambari provides central management for starting, stopping, and reconfiguring Hadoop services across the entire cluster.
· Monitor a Hadoop Cluster
o Ambari provides a dashboard for monitoring health and status of the Hadoop cluster.
o Ambari leverages Ganglia for metrics collection.
o Ambari leverages Nagios for system alerting and will send emails when your attention is needed (e.g., a node goes down, remaining disk space is low, etc).
Ambari enables Application Developers and System Integrators to:
· Easily integrate Hadoop provisioning, management, and monitoring capabilities to their own applications with the Ambari REST APIs.
· Ganglia is aimed at monitoring compute grids, i.e. a bunch of servers working on the same task to achieve a common goal - such as a cluster of web servers.
· Nagios is aimed at monitoring anything and everything - servers, services on servers, switches, network bandwidth via SNMP etc etc. Nagios will send alerts based on set criteria (ie, you can set it to send yourself an email or if x service dies).