Operations

Admin Wizard

The Quick Start wizard allows you to perform the following Hue setup operations by clicking the tab of each step or sequentially by clicking Next in each screen:

  1. Check Configuration validates your Hue configuration. It will note any potential misconfiguration and provide hints as to how to fix them. You can edit the configuration file described in the next section or use Cloudera Manager, if installed, to manage your changes.
  2. Examples contains links to install examples into the Hive, Impala, MapReduce, Spark, Oozie, Solr Dashboard and Pig Editor applications.
  3. Users contains a link to the User Admin application to create or import users and a checkbox to enable and disable collection of usage information.

Configuration

Displays a list of the installed Hue applications and their configuration. The location of the folder containing the Hue configuration files is shown at the top of the page. Hue configuration settings are in the hue.ini configuration file.

Click the tabs under Configuration Sections and Variables to see the settings configured for each application. For information on configuring these settings, see Hue Configuration in the Hue installation manual.

Hue ships with a default configuration that will work for pseudo-distributed clusters. If you are running on a real cluster, you must make a few changes to the hue.ini configuration file (/etc/hue/hue.ini when installed from the package version) or pseudo-distributed.ini in desktop/conf when in development mode). The following sections describe the key configuration options you must make to configure Hue.

To list all available configuration options, run: $ /usr/share/hue/build/env/bin/hue config_help | less This commands outlines the various sections and options in the configuration, and provides help and information on the default values.
To view the current configuration from within Hue, open: http:///hue/dump_config
Hue loads and merges all of the files with extension `.ini` located in the `/etc/hue` directory. Files that are alphabetically later take precedence.

Configuration Validation

Hue can detect certain invalid configuration.

To view the configuration of a running Hue instance, navigate to http://myserver:8888/hue/dump_config, also accessible through the About application.

Server Logs

Displays the Hue Server log and allows you to download the log to your local system in a zip file.

Threads

Read more on the Threads and Metrics pages blog post

Threads page can be very helpful in debugging purposes. It includes a daemonic thread and the thread objects serving concurrent requests. The host name, thread name identifier and current stack frame of each are displayed. Those are useful when Hue “hangs”, sometimes in case of a request too CPU intensive. There is also a REST API to get the dump of Threads using ‘desktop/debug/threads’

Metrics

Read more on the Threads and Metrics pages blog post

Hue uses the PyFormance Python library to collect the metrics. These metrics are represented as gauge, counters, meter, rate of events over time, histogram, statistical distribution of values. A REST API endpoint ‘/desktop/metrics/’ to get all the metrics dump as json is also exposed

The below metrics of most concern to us are displayed on the page:

  • requests.active
  • requests.exceptions
  • requests.response-time
  • threads.daemon
  • threads.total
  • users
  • users.active

One of the most useful ones are the percentiles of response time of requests and the count of active users. Admins can either filter a particular property in all the metrics or select a particular metric for all properties

Logging

The Hue logs are found in /var/log/hue, or in a logs directory under your Hue installation root. Inside the log directory you can find:

  • An access.log file, which contains a log for all requests against the Hue web server.
  • A supervisor.log file, which contains log information for the supervisor process.
  • A supervisor.out file, which contains the stdout and stderr for the supervisor process.
  • A .log file for each supervised process described above, which contains the logs for that process.
  • A .out file for each supervised process described above, which contains the stdout and stderr for that process.

If users on your cluster have problems running Hue, you can often find error messages in these log files. If you are unable to start Hue from the init script, the supervisor.log log file can often contain clues.

In addition to logging INFO level messages to the logs directory, the Hue web server keeps a small buffer of log messages at all levels in memory. You can view these logs by visiting http://myserver:8888/hue/logs. The DEBUG level messages shown can sometimes be helpful in troubleshooting issues.

Commands

Type the following command from the Hue installation root.

cd /usr/lib/hue (or /opt/cloudera/parcels/CDH-XXXXX/share/hue if using parcels and CM)
build/env/bin/hue shell

To list all the available commands:

build/env/bin/hue

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot why Hue is slow or consuming high memory, admin can enable instrumentation by setting the instrumentation flag to True.

[desktop]
instrumentation=true

If django_debug_mode is enabled, instrumentation is automatically enabled. This flag appends the response time and the total peak memory used since Hue started for every logged request.

Instrumentation enabled

[17/Apr/2018 15:18:43 -0700] access       INFO     127.0.0.1 admin - "POST /jobbrowser/jobs/ HTTP/1.1" `returned in 97ms (mem: 135mb)`

Instrumentation not enabled

[23/Apr/2018 10:59:01 -0700] INFO     127.0.0.1 admin - "POST /jobbrowser/jobs/ HTTP/1.1" returned in 88ms

Database

See the dedicated Database section.