Articles tagged Membase

The views expressed in this blog are strictly personal, and do not necessarily represent the views of Evident Software.

Couchbase, Membase and Memcached – our perspective

Date: February 15, 2011
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By Scott Barnett

I just happened to be in California last week when Membase and CouchOne announced their merger.  First, this is excellent news for the NoSQL movement, and it seems happy times at the new Couchbase.  I happened to be in Palo Alto when I saw Bob’s blog, so I wandered over to Tied House and shared a few pints with the folks.  I had a chance to meet Bob and several members of the Membase team (Melinda, Perry and of course James who could not wipe the smile off his face!).  I also had a chance to meet Damien (and his lovely wife) from the CouchOne team, and we got serenaded with a new merger song which was penned at the party.  There were also several folks from companies that were using NoSQL in their environments (including one guy whose name I have forgotten (sorry!), but I do remember he worked in the same building as Membase but was using MongoDB for their application!  Shame :-) .  I met folks from Facebook, Canonical, Battery Ventures among others – it’s always great to feel the Valley vibe.

Beyond drinks and laughing, there was cause for real celebration. Both the Membase and Couch folks are seeing significant traction, and they had some great positioning in mind for the combined company. The combined ability to do caching, clustering, with a document database is the consolidation we predicted would happen in the NoSQL market.  CouchOne’s positioning with mobile gives them yet another growing channel for usage of Web and cloud applications where performance (and not transactions) are paramount.

Of course, we feel that this makes ClearStone’s positioning even more important as the leading APM tool for NoSQL – developers and operations will need tools that provide deep visibility into the NoSQL “stack”, which more often than not includes Couchbase, Membase or Memcached, as well as stats, correlation and relationship-mapping with the other tiers such as RDBMS, Web, Application, System, Network, etc., etc.

So, while we just released 5.0 Beta with Management Packs for Memcached stats and performance optimization and Membase, we will be adding support for CouchOne/Couchbase as they expose more monitoring capabilities.  In fact, 5.0 comes with a RESTful API that allows developers to build their own Management Packs, so if somebody wants to take a crack at the first Couchbase adapter for ClearStone, we’re ready for you!!

Congratulations again to both the Membase and CouchOne teams, and best wishes for continued success.

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Proactively Monitoring Memcached Stats with Evident ClearStone (ECS)

Date: December 2, 2010
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By Tim Sneed

A while back we released a Memcached performance monitoring management pack that supports statistics collection on Memcached instances. The management pack collects all of the stats one would see by simply calling the “stats” command via a telnet socket interface. By piping metrics from multiple Memcached instances into a single collector, ECS allows users to create “logical” clusters of Memcached instances to monitor. This means that if your Memcached client has 4 Memcached instances it uses for hashing and storing, you would essentially configure ECS to collect stats from each of the 4 instances. Once the individual instance metric data is in ECS, it is also aggregated to a “cluster” level so one can monitor the health of the Memcached stack as a whole, not just the instances individually.

For a developer, monitoring Memcached data in real-time via ECS’s Real-Time Dashboard might be ideal to test different load scenarios on a set of Memcached instances and see how the instances react. This has helped one group fine-tune their compression methods on items being stored in a Memcached instance. But for an operations team, it would be inefficient to employ someone to stare at the real-time feed of metric data and look for problems. Therefore, for a Memcached stack that is in production, ECS allows administrators to set up threshold detection on any metric that flows through its pipeline. This is essential to provide the operations team with instant notification of problem areas or keeping track of KPIs.

For example, a common issue that arises with Memcached is knowing when to bring up more instances. Most need to bring up more instances when the free memory of the Memcached instance or group of instances is running out. With ECS, an administrator can configure a threshold to watch the “% Memory Free” metric (can be at cluster or instance level). In the event that the threshold is hit, emails will be sent out to the operations team to notify them that this threshold is being hit. Knowing that their memory is running low, the operations team can then kick off a new instance of Memcached to ensure that premature evictions do not occur and requests are being served. Requests not being served could mean increased response times for your website. Another common issue is a high number of missed keys. If a threshold is set and a notification is received that there is a high number of missed keys, it allows the operations (or development) team to be proactive and have immediate scope into the problem rather than waiting for someone to complain that response times are slow somewhere higher up the stack or that there is data missing from the cache.

Having this type of visibility and responding to these issues before they become a bigger problem is paramount to running a healthy cluster of Memcached instances. The Management Pack for Memcached is a perfect tool for users of Memcached to be proactive about their environment. With the Real-Time Dashboard and threshold configuration, both the ops and dev teams can obtain immediate visibility to problem areas and understand quickly how to solve them.

Lastly, since Membase is built on top of Memcached, one can use the Management Pack for Memcached to monitor their Membase environment. We are currently working on an extension to the Memcached management pack to monitor not only the underlying Memcached instance, but also collect information from Membase’s Management REST API (a RESTfulservice provided by Membase). Through the REST API, ECS will be able to collect information on Membase-specific architecture (pools, buckets, etc.) that will allow for further understanding of the health of a Membase cluster.

An example of a threshold configuration that recognizes low cluster memory within an Memcached environment.

An example of a threshold configuration that recognizes when a specific key is being missed too often within an Memcached environment.

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NoSQL Logging, NoSQL Reporting & Performance Monitoring with ClearStone 4.5

Date: November 14, 2010
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By Scott Barnett

Last month, we launched Evident ClearStone 4.5, which includes NoSQL logging and NoSQL reporting features. This software release marks an important milestone in the evolution of Evident Software. Over the summer, we made a decision to aggressively go after the NoSQL DB market, expanding our previous support for compute-grid technologies such as DataSynapse and application-grid technologies such as Oracle Coherence by offering NoSQL reporting, NoSQL logging, management and performance monitoring.

Why make this change of course? There were several reasons:

  1. NoSQL might not still be called “NoSQL” in a few years, but it absolutely will be an important technology for enterprise applications. Think back to how the Java Application Server came of age in the mid/late 1990′s. That technology required several iterations to become the Java Application Server. The market took a few years to coalesce and turn into something that the broad industry could understand, market, and build around. Today NoSQL is going through a similar evolution. We’re just starting to see forecasts of the size of the NoSQL market. We suspect it won’t be called NoSQL a year from now (some other people seem to agree) – as technologies such as Hadoop, Data Caching Platforms such as Coherence, GemFire, Terracotta and hybrid in-memory databases such as VoltDB all vie for developer mind-share. Whatever it’s called, this is the “new” tier in the application stack, and it’s going to need focused and dedicated capabilities from a management/monitoring perspective, including NoSQL logging and NoSQL reporting. Here’s a great database (no pun intended) of systems that fall into the NoSQL realm.
  2. Correlating metrics and events between the NoSQL tier and the other existing tiers in the application (and system) stack will be key capabilities for monitoring and managing NoSQL applications. Each tier cannot continue to have its own NoSQL logging and monitoring capabilities – monitoring needs to be integrated, so enterprises can get a holistic view of their applications. This is a hard problem to solve.It’s also a valuable problem to solve. We are solving this problem already now for the caching technologies I listed above. Now we want continue extending this capability across the different tiers of the application stack.
  3. Visualization is the key to success in APM. When you are gathering so many metrics/events in real time, it’s a challenge to determine what is really important to DevOps.. We’ve been told we’ve done a great job of figuring this one out – our user interface is intuitive, attractive, and meaningful. Making sense of all that data is hard to do. Without it, you have lots of great data with no insight. You need insight to make good decisions.
  4. Our goal is to support every NoSQL system out there. To meet this goal requires a change of strategy – so you will see us open up our platform so that people can build and deploy their own “Management Packs.” We currently have Management Packs for DataSynapse GridServer, Oracle Coherence, Apache Cassandra, Memcached (with Membase coming very soon), WebLogic Server, and jBoss. We are working on many more, but we want to move even faster. So you will see a Management Pack framework that allows developers to build their own Management Packs (we can help you too!). It is not hard to do this, and we will roll out a developer site shortly for people to share/collaborate/contribute. We will start by contributing our own management packs to the site.

So, 4.5 is the next step in our evolution and a hearty step forward in our embrace of all things NoSQL as the latest, greatest participant in the application stack. From our conversations with customers and prospects over the past few months, we know many of you agree our vision of NoSQL reporting, monitoring and management. We look forward to working with you on this initiative in the months and years ahead. We are very interested in your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions on how to continue this process, so please share your ideas with us!

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