Apache Kudu Administration

Kudu master processes serve their web interface on port 8051. The interface exposes several pages with information about the state of the cluster.

• A list of tablet servers, their host names, and the time of their last heartbeat.

• A list of tables, including schema and tablet location information for each.

• SQL code which you can paste into Impala Shell to add an existing table to Impala’s list of known data sources.

Each tablet server serves a web interface on port 8050. The interface exposes information about each tablet hosted on the server, its current state, and debugging information about maintenance background operations.

Both Kudu masters and tablet servers expose the following information via their web interfaces:

• HTTP access to server logs.

• An /rpcz endpoint which lists currently running RPCs via JSON.

• Details about the memory usage of different components of the process.

• The current set of configuration flags.

• Currently running threads and their resource consumption.

• A JSON endpoint exposing metrics about the server.

• The version number of the daemon deployed on the cluster.

These interfaces are linked from the landing page of each daemon’s web UI.

The full set of available metrics for a Kudu server can be dumped using a special command line flag:

$ kudu-tserver --dump_metrics_json
$ kudu-master --dump_metrics_json

This will output a large JSON document. Each metric indicates its name, label, description, units, and type. Because the output is JSON-formatted, this information can easily be parsed and fed into other tooling which collects metrics from Kudu servers.

For the complete list of metrics collected by Cloudera Manager for a Kudu service, look for the Kudu metrics listed under Cloudera Manager Metrics .

Metrics can be collected from a server process via its HTTP interface by visiting /metrics. The output of this page is JSON for easy parsing by monitoring services. This endpoint accepts several GET parameters in its query string:

• /metrics?metrics=<substring1>,<substring2>,…​ - Limits the returned metrics to those which contain at least one of the provided substrings. The substrings also match entity names, so this may be used to collect metrics for a specific tablet.

• /metrics?include_schema=1 - Includes metrics schema information such as unit, description, and label in the JSON output. This information is typically omitted to save space.

• /metrics?compact=1 - Eliminates unnecessary whitespace from the resulting JSON, which can decrease bandwidth when fetching this page from a remote host.

• /metrics?include_raw_histograms=1 - Include the raw buckets and values for histogram metrics, enabling accurate aggregation of percentile metrics over time and across hosts.

For example:

$ curl -s 'http://example-ts:8050/metrics?include_schema=1&metrics=connections_accepted'

[
    {
        "type": "server",
        "id": "kudu.tabletserver",
        "attributes": {},
        "metrics": [
            {
                "name": "rpc_connections_accepted",
                "label": "RPC Connections Accepted",
                "type": "counter",
                "unit": "connections",
                "description": "Number of incoming TCP connections made to the RPC server",
                "value": 92
            }
        ]
    }
]

$ curl -s 'http://example-ts:8050/metrics?metrics=log_append_latency'

[
    {
        "type": "tablet",
        "id": "c0ebf9fef1b847e2a83c7bd35c2056b1",
        "attributes": {
            "table_name": "lineitem",
            "partition": "hash buckets: (55), range: [(<start>), (<end>))",
            "table_id": ""
        },
        "metrics": [
            {
                "name": "log_append_latency",
                "total_count": 7498,
                "min": 4,
                "mean": 69.3649,
                "percentile_75": 29,
                "percentile_95": 38,
                "percentile_99": 45,
                "percentile_99_9": 95,
                "percentile_99_99": 167,
                "max": 367244,
                "total_sum": 520098
            }
        ]
    }
]

Kudu may be configured to periodically dump all of its metrics to a local log file using the --metrics_log_interval_msflag. Set this flag to the interval at which metrics should be written to a diagnostics log file.

The diagnostics log will be written to the same directory as the other Kudu log files, with a similar naming format, substituting diagnostics instead of a log level like INFO. After any diagnostics log file reaches 64MB uncompressed, the log will be rolled and the previous file will be gzip-compressed.

The log file generated has three space-separated fields. The first field is the word metrics. The second field is the current timestamp in microseconds since the Unix epoch. The third is the current value of all metrics on the server, using a compact JSON encoding. The encoding is the same as the metrics fetched via HTTP described above.

To provide high availability and to avoid a single point of failure, Kudu clusters should be created with multiple masters. Many Kudu clusters were created with just a single master, either for simplicity or because Kudu multi-master support was still experimental at the time. This workflow demonstrates how to migrate to a multi-master configuration. It can also be used to migrate from two masters to three with straightforward modifications.

Kudu multi-master deployments function normally in the event of a master loss. However, it is important to replace the dead master. Otherwise a second failure may lead to a loss of availability, depending on the number of available masters. This workflow describes how to replace the dead master.

Due to KUDU-1620, it is not possible to perform this workflow without also restarting the live masters. As such, the workflow requires a maintenance window, albeit a potentially brief one if the cluster was set up with DNS aliases.

When replacing dead masters, use DNS aliases to prevent long maintenance windows. If the cluster was set up without aliases, change the host names as described in this section.

The kudu CLI includes a tool called ksck which can be used for monitoring cluster health and data integrity. ksck will identify issues such as under-replicated tablets, unreachable tablet servers, or tablets without a leader.

ksck should be run from the command line, and requires you to specify the complete list of Kudu master addresses:

$ sudo -u kudu kudu cluster ksck master-01.example.com,master-02.example.com,master-03.example.com

To see the full list of the options available with ksck, either use the --help flag or see Kudu command line reference documentation.

If the cluster is healthy, ksck will print a success message, and return a zero (success) exit status.

Connected to the Master
Fetched info from all 1 Tablet Servers
Table IntegrationTestBigLinkedList is HEALTHY (1 tablet(s) checked)

The metadata for 1 table(s) is HEALTHY
OK

If the cluster is unhealthy, for instance if a tablet server process has stopped, ksck will report the issue(s) and return a non-zero exit status:

Connected to the Master
WARNING: Unable to connect to Tablet Server 8a0b66a756014def82760a09946d1fce
(tserver-01.example.com:7050): Network error: could not send Ping RPC to server: Client connection negotiation failed: client connection to 192.168.0.2:7050: connect: Connection refused (error 61)
WARNING: Fetched info from 0 Tablet Servers, 1 weren't reachable
Tablet ce3c2d27010d4253949a989b9d9bf43c of table 'IntegrationTestBigLinkedList'
is unavailable: 1 replica(s) not RUNNING
  8a0b66a756014def82760a09946d1fce (tserver-01.example.com:7050): TS unavailable [LEADER]
  Table IntegrationTestBigLinkedList has 1 unavailable tablet(s)

  : 1 out of 1 table(s) are not in a healthy state
  ==================
  Errors:
  ==================
  error fetching info from tablet servers: Network error: Not all Tablet Servers are reachable
  table consistency check error: Corruption: 1 table(s) are bad

  FAILED
  Runtime error: ksck discovered errors

To verify data integrity, the optional --checksum-scan flag can be set, which will ensure that the cluster has consistent data by scanning each tablet replica and comparing results. The --tables and --tablets flags can be used to limit the scope of the checksum scan to specific tables or tablets, respectively.

For example, use the following command to check the integrity of data in the IntegrationTestBigLinkedList table:

$ sudo -k kudu kudu cluster ksck --checksum-scan --tables IntegrationTestBigLinkedList master-01.example.com,master-02.example.com,master-03.example.com

For higher read parallelism and larger volumes of storage per server, you may want to configure servers to store data in multiple directories on different devices. Once a server is started, you must go through the following steps to change the directory configuration.

You can add or remove data directories to an existing master or tablet server via the kudu fs update_dirs tool. Data is striped across data directories, and when a new data directory is added, new data will be striped across the union of the old and new directories.

1. The tool can only run while the server is offline, so establish a maintenance window to update the server. The tool itself runs quickly, so this offline window should be brief, and as such, only the server to update needs to be offline.

   However, if the server is offline for too long (see the follower_unavailable_considered_failed_sec flag), the tablet replicas on it may be evicted from their Raft groups. To avoid this, it may be desirable to bring the entire cluster offline while performing the update.

2. Run the tool with the desired directory configuration flags. For example, if a cluster was set up with --fs_wal_dir=/wals, --fs_metadata_dir=/meta, and --fs_data_dirs=/data/1,/data/2,/data/3, and /data/3 is to be removed (e.g. due to a disk error), run the command::

   $ sudo -u kudu kudu fs update_dirs --force --fs_wal_dir=/wals --fs_metadata_dir=/meta --fs_data_dirs=/data/1,/data/2

3. Modify the values of the fs_data_dirs flags for the updated sever. If using Cloudera Manager, make sure to only update the configurations of the updated server, rather than of the entire Kudu service.
4. Once complete, the server process can be started. When Kudu is installed using system packages, service is typically used:

   $ sudo service kudu-tserver start

Kudu nodes can only survive failures of disks on which certain Kudu directories are mounted. For more information about the different Kudu directory types, see the section on Directory Configurations.

When a disk failure occurs that does not lead to a crash, Kudu will stop using the affected directory, shut down tablets with blocks on the affected directories, and automatically re-replicate the affected tablets to other tablet servers. The affected server will remain alive and print messages to the log indicating the disk failure, for example:

E1205 19:06:24.163748 27115 data_dirs.cc:1011] Directory /data/8/kudu/data marked as failed
E1205 19:06:30.324795 27064 log_block_manager.cc:1822] Not using report from /data/8/kudu/data: IO error: Could not open container 0a6283cab82d4e75848f49772d2638fe: /data/8/kudu/data/0a6283cab82d4e75848f49772d2638fe.metadata: Read-only file system (error 30)
E1205 19:06:33.564638 27220 ts_tablet_manager.cc:946] T 4957808439314e0d97795c1394348d80 P 70f7ee61ead54b1885d819f354eb3405: aborting tablet bootstrap: tablet has data in a failed directory

While in this state, the affected node will avoid using the failed disk, leading to lower storage volume and reduced read parallelism. The administrator should schedule a brief window to Changing Directory Configuration to exclude the failed disk.

When the disk is repaired, remounted, and ready to be reused by Kudu, take the following steps:

1. Make sure that the Kudu portion of the disk is completely empty.
2. Stop the tablet server.
3. Run the update_dirs tool. For example, to add /data/3, run the following:

   sudo -u kudu kudu fs update_dirs --force --fs_wal_dir=/wals \
   --fs_data_dirs=/data/1,/data/2,/data/3

4. Start the tablet server.
5. Run ksck to verify cluster health. For example:

   sudo -u kudu kudu cluster ksck master-01.example.com

By default, Kudu reserves a small amount of space, 1% by capacity, in its directories. Kudu considers a disk full if there is less free space available than the reservation. Kudu nodes can only tolerate running out of space on disks on which certain Kudu directories are mounted. For more information about the different Kudu directory types, see Directory Configurations. The table below describes this behavior for each type of directory. The behavior is uniform across masters and tablet servers.

Prior to Kudu 1.7.0, Kudu stripes tablet data across all directories, and will avoid writing data to full directories. Kudu will crash if all data directories are full.

In 1.7.0 and later, new tablets are assigned a disk group consisting of data directories. The number of data directories are as specified by the -fs_target_data_dirs_per_tablet flag with the default being 3. If Kudu is not configured with enough data directories for a full disk group, all data directories are used. When a data directory is full, Kudu will stop writing new data to it and each tablet that uses that data directory will write new data to other data directories within its group. If all data directories for a tablet are full, Kudu will crash. Periodically, Kudu will check if full data directories are still full, and will resume writing to those data directories if space has become available.

If Kudu does crash because its data directories are full, freeing space on the full directories will allow the affected daemon to restart and resume writing. Note that it may be possible for Kudu to free some space by running:

$ sudo -u kudu kudu fs check --repair

However, the above command may also fail if there is too little space left.

It’s also possible to allocate additional data directories to Kudu in order to increase the overall amount of storage available. See the documentation onupdating a node’s directory configuration for more information. Note that existing tablets will not use new data directories, so adding a new data directory does not resolve issues with full disks.

Suppose a tablet has lost a majority of its replicas. The first step in diagnosing and fixing the problem is to examine the tablet's state using ksck:

$ sudo -u kudu kudu cluster ksck --tablets=e822cab6c0584bc0858219d1539a17e6 master-00,master-01,master-02
Connected to the Master
Fetched info from all 5 Tablet Servers
Tablet e822cab6c0584bc0858219d1539a17e6 of table 'my_table' is unavailable: 2 replica(s) not RUNNING
  638a20403e3e4ae3b55d4d07d920e6de (tserver-00:7150): RUNNING
  9a56fa85a38a4edc99c6229cba68aeaa (tserver-01:7150): bad state
    State:       FAILED
    Data state:  TABLET_DATA_READY
    Last status: <failure message>
  c311fef7708a4cf9bb11a3e4cbcaab8c (tserver-02:7150): bad state
    State:       FAILED
    Data state:  TABLET_DATA_READY
    Last status: <failure message>

This output shows that, for tablet e822cab6c0584bc0858219d1539a17e6, the two tablet replicas on tserver-01 and tserver-02 failed. The remaining replica is not the leader, so the leader replica failed as well. This means the chance of data loss is higher since the remaining replica on tserver-00 may have been lagging. In general, to accept the potential data loss and restore the tablet from the remaining replicas, divide the tablet replicas into two groups:

1. Healthy replicas: Those in RUNNING state as reported by ksck
2. Unhealthy replicas

For example, in the above ksck output, the replica on tablet server tserver-00 is healthy while the replicas on tserver-01 and tserver-02 are unhealthy. On each tablet server with a healthy replica, alter the consensus configuration to remove unhealthy replicas. In the typical case of 1 out of 3 surviving replicas, there will be only one healthy replica, so the consensus configuration will be rewritten to include only the healthy replica.

$ sudo -u kudu kudu remote_replica unsafe_change_config tserver-00:7150 <tablet-id> <tserver-00-uuid>

where <tablet-id> is e822cab6c0584bc0858219d1539a17e6 and <tserver-00-uuid> is the uuid of tserver-00, 638a20403e3e4ae3b55d4d07d920e6de.

Once the healthy replicas' consensus configurations have been forced to exclude the unhealthy replicas, the healthy replicas will be able to elect a leader. The tablet will become available for writes though it will still be under-replicated. Shortly after the tablet becomes available, the leader master will notice that it is under-replicated, and will cause the tablet to re-replicate until the proper replication factor is restored. The unhealthy replicas will be tombstoned by the master, causing their remaining data to be deleted.

In the event that critical files are lost, i.e. WALs or tablet-specific metadata, all Kudu directories on the server must be deleted and rebuilt to ensure correctness. Doing so will destroy the copy of the data for each tablet replica hosted on the local server. Kudu will automatically re-replicate tablet replicas removed in this way, provided the replication factor is at least three and all other servers are online and healthy.

If you find that the size of your Kudu cloud deployment has exceeded previous expectations, or you simply wish to allocate more storage to Kudu, use the following set of high-level steps as a guide to increasing storage on your Kudu master or tablet server hosts. You must work with your cluster's Hadoop administrators and the system administrators to complete this process. Replace the file paths in the following steps to those relevant to your setup.