Nivas Shankar and Mert Hocanin show us how to use a couple of products to tune Hive and Spark jobs:
Data engineers and ETL developers often spend a significant amount of time running and tuning Apache Spark jobs with different parameters to evaluate performance, which can be challenging and time-consuming. Dr. Elephant and Sparklens help you tune your Spark and Hive applications by monitoring your workloads and providing suggested changes to optimize performance parameters, like required Executor nodes, Core nodes, Driver Memory and Hive (Tez or MapReduce) jobs on Mapper, Reducer, Memory, Data Skew configurations. Dr. Elephant gathers job metrics, runs analysis on them, and presents optimization recommendations in a simple way for easy consumption and corrective actions. Similarly, Sparklens makes it easy to understand the scalability limits of Spark applications and compute resources, and runs efficiently with well-defined methods instead of leaning by trial and error, which saves both developer and compute time.
This post demonstrates how to install Dr. Elephant and Sparklens on an Amazon EMR cluster and run workloads to demonstrate these tools’ capabilities. Amazon EMR is a managed Hadoop service offered by AWS to easily and cost-effectively run Hadoop and other open-source frameworks on AWS.
Even if you aren’t using ElasticMapReduce, Dr. Elephant and Sparklens are quite useful products.