This talk covers building a distributed database cluster and monitoring it. The tools covered will be HBase, Chef, OpenTSDB. If you are a large system administrator, or have been saddled with administering a Hadoop cluster, this talk will cover some of the finer points learned from building and administering multiple such clusters in the past. Much of the experience gained will be applicable in non-Chef and non-Hadoop environments (for example, if you deploy Cassandra via Puppet).