How to read the cassandra nodetool histograms percentile and other columns?

Question

How to read the cassandra nodetool histograms percentile and other coulmns?

Percentile  SSTables     Write Latency      Read Latency    Partition Size        Cell Count
                              (micros)          (micros)           (bytes)                  
50%             1.00             14.24           4055.27               149                 2
75%            35.00             17.08          17436.92               149                 2
95%            35.00             24.60          74975.55               642                 2
98%            86.00             35.43         129557.75               770                 2
99%           103.00             51.01         186563.16               770                 2
Min             0.00              2.76             51.01               104                 2
Max           124.00       36904729.27       12359319.16               924                 2

Answer 1

They show the distribution of the metrics. For example, in your data the write latency for 95% of the requests were 24.60 microseconds or less. 95% of the partitions are 642 bytes or less with 2 cells. The SStables column is how many sstables are touched on a read, so 95% or read requests are looking at 35 sstables (this is fairly high).