Ganglia is an open-source, scalable and distributed monitoring system for large clusters. It collects, aggregates and provides time-series views of tens of machine-related metrics such as CPU, memory, storage, network usage. You can see Ganglia in action at UC Berkeley Grid.
Ganglia is also a popular solution for monitoring Hadoop and HBase clusters, since Hadoop (and HBase) has built-in support for publishing its metrics to Ganglia. With Ganglia you may easily see the number of bytes written by a particular HDSF datanode over time, the block cache hit ratio for a given HBase region server, the total number of requests to the HBase cluster, time spent in garbage collection and many, many others.
