I already wrote about recovering the ghost nodes in Amazon EMR clusters, but in this article I am going to extend this information for EMR clusters configured for auto-scaling.

In a Hadoop cluster besides Active nodes you may also have Unhealthy, Lost and Decommissioned nodes. Unhealthy nodes are running but just excluded from scheduling the tasks because they, for example, do not have enough disk space. Lost nodes are nodes that are not reachable anymore. The decommissioned nodes are nodes that successfully terminated and left the cluster.

But all these nodes are known to the Hadoop YARN cluster and you can see their details such as IP addresses, last health updates and so on.

At the same time there can be also Ghost nodes i.e. nodes that are running by Amazon EMR services but Hadoop itself does not know anything about their existence. Let’s see how you can find them.

Usually Hadoop is able to automatically recover cluster nodes from Unhealthy state by cleaning log and temporary directories. But sometimes nodes stay unhealthy for a long time and manual intervention is necessary to bring them back.

Amazon EMR allows you to define scale-out and scale-in rules to automatically add and remove instances based on the metrics you specify.

In this article I am going to explore the instance controller logs that can be very useful in monitoring the auto-scaling. The logs are located in /emr/instance-controller/log/ directory on the EMR master node.

When you run many Hadoop clusters it is useful to automatically collect metrics from all clusters in a single place (Hive table i.e.).

This allows you to perform any advanced and custom analysis of your clusters workload and not be limited to the features provided by Hadoop Administration UI tools that often offer only per cluster view so it is hard to see the whole picture of your data platform.