Cassandra Monitoring is part of Instana’s AI Powered Microservice APM solution. Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed NoSQL database designed to handle large amounts of data across a number of servers with no single point of failure. It specializes in supporting clusters than span across many data centers, and to this end is capable of asynchronous masterless replication. This is a highly flexible methodology, but it does come with a cost. A common downside is that Cassandra is not row level consistent; inserts and updates on the same table that effect the same row may clash, resulting in inconsistent data.
If Instana is deployed into an infrastructure containing Apache Cassandra, the agent will automatically detect the technology and deploy the correct sensor to monitor Cassandra and its interaction with the database. No human setup or configuration is required.