You can use YARN REST API to collect various Hadoop cluster metrics such as available and allocated memory, CPU, containers and so on.

If you set up a process to extract data from this API once per minute e.g. you can very easily collect and analyze historical and current cluster utilization quite accurately. For more details, see Collecting Utilization Metrics from Multiple Clusters article.

But even if you query YARN REST API every second it still can only provide a snapshot of the used YARN resources. It does not show which application allocates or releases containers, their memory and CPU capacity, in which order these events occur, what is their exact timestamp and so on.

For this reason I prefer a different approach that is based on using the YARN Resource Manager logs to calculate the exact per second utilization metrics of a Hadoop cluster.