MapR Spyglass Initiative Eases Big Data Management

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Hadoop distribution company MapR is rolling out a new management capability to help enterprises get a handle on their big data deployments. Designed to work with the MapR Converged Data Platform, which is composed of several open source big data technologies, MapR's Spyglass Initiative offers deep visibility and customizable dashboards that can help increase user and administrator productivity, the company said in an announcement released at the Hadoop Summit this week.

Because enterprises already have monitoring and other tools for managing their infrastructure, the Spyglass Initiative is offering APIs to enable organizations to integrate this tool into their existing sets, according to Dale Kim, senior director of product marketing at MapR, who spoke to InformationWeek in an interview.

The visibility into the converged environment covers all the components of the MapR Converged Data Platform including NoSQL, Hadoop, and Spark.

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"This is important for a lot of our customers who are continuing to expand their deployments with new use-cases, more data, and more users," Kim said. "They want to get an enhanced view and [a] better handle [on] how they want to grow their clusters and allocate resources to best take advantage of data."

MapR calls the Spyglass Initiative "a multi-release effort" that will roll out over several quarters. MapR calls Phase 1 MapR Monitoring and is rolling out the initial piece this summer. It includes node/infrastructure monitoring, cluster space utilization monitoring, YARN/MapReduce application monitoring, and service daemon monitoring.

Administrators can customize dashboards to visualize the metrics they want on both desktops and mobile devices. They can also access the analytics of log data. MapR said that these dashboards are defined with JSON, that they are easy to export and import in Grafana and Kibana, and that they integrate with other tools via REST API.

MapR Community Exchange

MapR has also announced the launch of the MapR Community Exchange, an online community of MapR users where they can share and collaborate on best practices. The community was launched three months ago, Kim told InformationWeek, and is designed to enable users to share use-cases, dashboards, code, tutorials, videos, and demos.

The Trouble With Converged Platforms

One of the challenges for enterprises looking to deploy open source technologies can be that each technology has its own release schedule, and new releases may not have been tested for interoperability with older releases. That's a reason why enterprise customers may often prefer commercial software releases.

To address this challenge, MapR is introducing the Ecosystem Pack. Kim said this Pack is a selected set of stable and popular components from the open source ecosystem that are fully tested to be interoperable and are available via installer or package.

These Ecosystem Packs will be released on a quarterly basis with updates coming monthly to address open source project bug fixes. The MapR Ecosystem Pack version 1.0 is slated for release in August, which is also when the MapR release 5.2 will be issued.

MapR updated its Converged Data Platform with support for Docker containers and additional security features in March.