Metric Collection and Storage with Cassandra

Cassandra is often used for storing time series data, such as application/server metrics for monitoring and capacity planning purposes. The basic data model for metric storage in Cassandra consists of a metric ID (the row key) and a collection of timestamp/value pairs (columns in a row). OpsCenter, a tool for managing and monitoring Cassandra clusters, tracks metrics about nodes and stores this data inside Cassandra before presenting it as user-friendly graphs. Metric tracking/collection is a common use case in Cassandra, with specific practices including using timestamps as column names to automatically sort data points by time, aggregating raw collected data points into more manageable sets, and preventing rows from becoming too large through expiring older metric data or sharding metric rows.