On Sep 26, 2012, at 9:31 AM, John Sanda <jsanda@redhat.com> wrote:

One possibility is to not fully initialize MeasurementManager until we have Cassandra up and running. This would require either the server to send notification to all agents so the each MeasurementManager instance can start up and start collecting metrics. Or the agent/MeasurementManager could poll the server to see when it can start collecting metrics. Neither of these is particularly appealing to me.

I know you're reluctant to embed a cassandra node in the same VM as the app server - but does that help out here?  Scaling cassandra out can then be done via provisioning