DataStax (http://www.datastax.com) is the leading company that provides commercial support for Cassandra. At the time of writing, DataStax claimed to employ more than 90 percent of Cassandra committers. DataStax provides an easy-to-use, web-based utility—OpsCenter—that is a little more than a GUI wrapper over Cassandra's JMX instrumentation. OpsCenter provides a clean, simple, and intuitive interface to manage and monitor a Cassandra cluster. This section will briefly go over OpsCenter. The following screenshot shows DataStax OpsCenter's cluster view and actionable items:

DataStax provides two versions of OpsCenter: an enterprise version and a community version. The enterprise version has more features and official support, and it is paid for. The community version can be downloaded and used for free in a production environment. You may download and evaluate the enterprise version for free for development purposes. In this section, we will briefly go over installing, configuring...