HBase design and performance is very much dependent on how it is being used with any application. Though all metrics and tools discussed in the previous section provide the system-level monitoring, but this does not ensure that the application accessing HBase is getting optimal performance from HBase. However, monitoring definitely ensures that the statistics help in optimizing the performance, for example, the Put, Get, or Scan performance achieved by the client for any region server, network latencies, number of concurrent clients and many more. All this information actually not only helps to fine tune HBase but also in understanding the client expectation from HBase.

Performance is always measured in terms of the response times of the performed operations. However, this response time is also measured in the context of client's needs; for example, an online shopping application backed by an HBase cluster should get a response in milliseconds, whereas in the case of reporting...