MapR Technologies has launched the Spyglass Initiative -- a comprehensive, open, and extensible approach for increasing user and administrator productivity. The first in a series of releases as part of the Spyglass Initiative, MapR introduces new functionality to provide deep visibility with customisable dashboards that simplifies the management of big data deployments, enabling unprecedented views into converged data across containers, processes, components, and more.
“As a financial and audience marketing company, data is what we do at Cardlytics,” said Bret Lowery, technical director, data and architecture, Cardlytics. “MapR is a strategic partner in our plans for company growth. This will be a key enabler for us to monitor and maintain our growing list of mission-critical Hadoop and Apache stack systems and ensure we meet the data delivery expectations of our customers.”
The Spyglass Initiative was formed to simplify the management and extend the value of growing big data deployments. Organisations can be more effective in decision-making based on centralised information with a broad view of operational data that can easily be shared within and across organisations. The centralised monitoring opens the doors for big data analysis for all data-driven organisations. New features in the MapR Converged Data Platform include:
Deep search across cluster-wide metrics and logs. The new functionality integrates powerful and popular tools for aggregating and storing metrics and log data from MapR, providing deep visibility into a big data cluster to help plan next steps.
Shareable, powerful, customisable, mobile-ready, multi-tenant dashboards. Dashboards provide a complete view of cluster operations in user-defined formats. By leveraging the newly launched Exchange within the MapR Converge Community, customers can share custom dashboards with peers for a variety of visualisation tools, including Grafana and Kibana. This community-driven approach helps identify methods in a crowd-sourcing manner for faster and deeper insights on cluster operations across an entire multi-tenant big data environment.
Extensible APIs for third-party tool integration. Based on open source tools with open APIs, organisations are also free to use other options for visualising their data. MapR enables monitoring nodes/infrastructure (such as read/write throughput, and database operations), cluster space utilisation, YARN/MapReduce applications, and service daemons. All of these help customers understand the state of their cluster to more efficiently manage it and add more data and jobs.
“MapR is the only viable big data option for companies looking for the simplicity of one converged platform to manage all data needs,” said Robin Bloor, chief analyst, Bloor Group. “The company recognised early on the need for a unified enterprise-grade platform for files, database and streaming data. MapR introduces a single pane of glass to seamlessly monitor, search and analyse data across an organisation.”
In addition, MapR introduced today the MapR Ecosystem Pack (MEP), an enhanced programme for delivering the latest open source project versions while ensuring interoperability. MapR pioneered the practice of decoupling platform releases from open source project releases to allow incremental updates instead of complete upgrades across the deployment. MapR has been giving customers monthly updates to new project versions, and MEP is the next evolution of that programme to provide full certification on cross-project interoperability. With MEP, customers now have certified packs of open source projects, released on a quarterly basis. MEP continues delivering updates on a monthly basis to address open source project bug fixes.
“We’ve always focused on making big data easier for our customers and we’ve learned a lot from our customer successes, and have applied that learning to new capabilities that will help new customers with their big data journey,” said Anil Gadre, senior vice president, product management, MapR Technologies. “With this new release, we can help our customers in two distinct ways: customers now have a better view of cluster operations in MapR and they also have a better view of project interoperability.”
Also new in the MapR Platform are performance and JSON enhancements to MapR-DB. Advanced multi-master JSON replication provides mission-critical disaster recovery for JSON documents as well as a global view of enterprise-wide data in local deployments. The next phase of optimisations on solid state drives (SSDs) delivers faster parallel processing of data through MapR-DB.
