Concurrent Launches Driven APM Service for Hadoop Apps
Mike Vizard, IT Business Edge
February 7, 2014
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/it-unmasked/concurrent-launches-driven-apm-service-for-hadoop-apps.html

Cascading has emerged as an open source alternative to the Java application programming interface (API) for building Big Data applications on top of Hadoop. Developed by Concurrent, Cascading has now been deployed in over 6,000 applications, which now makes managing all those applications a challenge.

To address that issue, Concurrent this week unfurled Driven, an application performance management (APM) service that organizations using Cascading can employ via the cloud. Accessed via a plug-in that developers insert inside a Cascading application, Driven exposes an API that allows organizations to track a variety of application performance metrics in real time.

With more organizations building applications on top of Hadoop, Concurrent CTO Chris Wensel says that figuring out where a specific performance issue may lie across a cluster of servers that can consist of hundreds of servers is now a major challenge.

Currently in beta, Wensel says Driven makes it a lot easier to identify not only the applications that are failing to run, but those that are running poorly for one reason or another. That capability is especially critical, says Wensel, when dealing with Hadoop applications that routinely span multiple terabytes of data.

While the development of Big Data applications is clearly still in its infancy, the managing of those applications represents a major challenge of IT operations teams that often have little familiarity with Hadoop. Rather than acquiring APM tools for Big Data applications and the infrastructure needed to run them, Driven provides a convenient service alternative that can be quickly deployed. Best of all, that approach doesn’t require the IT operations team to become a master of all things Hadoop overnight.