Today, at Hadoop Summit in San Jose, CA, MapR announced its new SpyGlass initiative, designed to help customers have greater administrator productivity and more sophisticated cluster management. The first installment in this initiative is an operations monitoring solution - in effect a full blown log analytics platform - that stiches together ElasticSearch, OpenTSDB, MapR-DB, Kibana and Grafana to provide cluster operations dashboards, on both PC/laptop and mobile form factors (including phone and tablet).

No clustermuck

The dashboards contain information on node infrastructure, YARN, MapReduce, storage/CPU utilization as well as data for each of several services running on the cluster. In providing this functionality, the package ends up being MapR's answer to Cloudera Manager and Apache Ambari, as much as it is a machine analytics engine for the cluster.

The package, which is slated for release in early August, is customizable, allowing individual components to be swapped out for other visualization products on which the customer may be standardized. Alerting features are coming in the future and while the package is currently focused on log analytics for MapR clusters themselves, my take is that broadening of the platform to a more general log analytics solution is a possibility as well.

Release management

Separately, the company announced the MapR Ecosystem Pack (MEP), which decouples the base open source components in the MapR distribution, like YARN, Hive and Spark from the proprietary components like MapR-FS, MapR-DB and MapR Streams.

MEP releases, which contain the open source bits, can be installed before or, in some cases, after upgrades to new releases of the MapR core, proprietary components. This allows customers to benefit from a new feature of Hadoop or Spark without having to change out their MapR components, or else take advantage of new capabilities in the streaming or NoSQL platforms (for example) without having to change underlying Hadoop or Spark bits.

Microsoft shows SQL Server on Red Hat

Hadoop Summit may have kicked off today in San Jose, but Red Hat Summit had its lift-off yesterday up the peninsula, in San Francisco. At the show, Microsoft made a bunch of announcements concerning collaboration between the two companies around such Microsoft technologies as .NET Core (version 1.0 of which went into general availability today), Visual Studio Code and Azure.

Also read: Microsoft showcases SQL Server, .NET Core on Red Hat Enterprise Linux deliverables

Along that continuum, Microsoft will on Thursday be showing its SQL Server running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Initially SQL Server for Linux ran only on Ubuntu Linux, but Microsoft will show SQL Server running on RHEL at the Red Hat Summit general session at 1:45 PT on Thursday. You can even tune into a live stream of the event, if you'd like.

Also read: Why Microsoft needs SQL Server on Linux

And if you're worried that Microsoft's presence at the Red Hat event showing off its relational database technology means its commitment to Hadoop's yellow elephant has lessened, don't worry. Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Data Group, Joseph Sirosh, is keynoting Hadoop Summit this morning. His blog post has more information on today's yesterday's announcements.