Enterprises are falling over themselves to gain a competitive advantage using sophisticated tools like Hadoop, But as powerful as this technology is, Hadoop-based projects can quickly become a nightmare when performance problems work their way into complex Big Data operations. Unidentifiable bottlenecks, underused cluster capacity, problem users and jobs are just some of the difficulties enterprises face when trying to get to grips with Hadoop.

In an effort to ease the burden on enterprises, Pepperdata Inc., a startup that specializes in managing and fine-tuning Hadoop clusters to deliver better performance, is offering a new “Hadoop Health Check” program that’s able to uncover performance issues in a matter of hours.

The free assessment is designed to help companies evaluate and assess any problems they’re experiencing in Hadoop clusters with 100 or more nodes, providing full visibility into cluster conditions in real-time. Using Hadoop Health Check, enterprises can quickly identify any problems with their Hadoop operations and work out the best solution to fix them.

Using Pepperdata’s Health Check program is easy enough – simply install the company’s software on a production cluster, let it run, and within 72 hours or less Pepperdata provides a free diagnostic report on the state of their cluster. The report pinpoints issues such as problem users or jobs that consume too many resources, wasted cluster capacity, bottlenecks and root causes and more.

Pepperdata’s free health check software left a lasting impression on Mike Matchett, an analyst at Taneja Group, who stated it was capable of diagnosing even the most insidious of Hadoop problems.

“We expect that enterprises at the point of really scaling and growing a Big Data production stack will experience significant ROI with their first Health Check,” Matchett said. “It’s a big step towards companies understanding that with tools like Pepperdata they have the capabilities they need to accelerate their big data deployment plans.”

A number of companies have already taken that step, using Pepperdata’s health check tools to help identify and remedy problems with their Hadoop deployments. For example, one unnamed global storage firm was left scratching its head as to why a specific job was taking eight hours to complete, when previously it had only ever taken one hour to finish. Using Pepperdata’s tool, the company quickly identified that a spike in user demand had the knock-on effect of causing jobs to queue for up to seven hours.

“Pepperdata has helped numerous organizations obtain for the first time a full and clear picture of how their Hadoop clusters are performing in any distribution environment,” said Sean Suchter, CEO and cofounder, Pepperdata. “With the new Health Check program we have made it much easier and accessible for more companies to see the value and improvement that our product brings.”

Image credit: geralt via pixabay.com