Twitter Ambrose is a platform for visualization and real-time monitoring of MapReduce data workflows. It presents a global view of all the map-reduce jobs derived from your workflow after planning and optimization. As jobs are submitted for execution on your Hadoop cluster, Ambrose updates its visualization to reflect the latest job status, polled from your process.

Ambrose provides the following in a web UI:

• A table view of all the associated jobs, along with their current state
• Chord and graph diagrams to visualize job dependencies and current state
• An overall script progress bar

Ambrose is built using the following front-end technologies:

• D3.js - For diagram generation
• Bootstrap - For layout and CSS support

Ambrose is designed to support any workflow runtime, but current support is limited to Apache Pig.

Follow @Ambrose on Twitter to stay in touch!

• Pig - See pig/README.md
• Cascading - future work
• Scalding - future work
• Cascalog - future work
• Hive - future work

Below is a screenshot of the Ambrose UI. The interface presents multiple responsive "views" of a single workflow. Just beneath the toolbar at the top of the screen is a workflow progress bar that tracks overall completion percentage of the workflow. Below the progress bar are two diagrams which depict the workflow's jobs and their dependencies. Below the diagrams is a table of workflow jobs.

All views react to mouseover and click events on a job, regardless of the view on which the event is triggered; Moving your mouse over the first row of the table will highlight that job row along with the associated job arc in the chord diagram and job node in the graph diagram. Clicking on a job in any view will select it, updating the highlighting of that job in all views. Clicking twice on the same job will deselect it.

To get started with Ambrose, first clone the Ambrose Github repository:

git clone https://github.com/twitter/ambrose.git
cd ambrose

Next, you can try running the Ambrose demo on your local machine. The demo starts a local web server which serves the front-end client resources and sample data. Start the demo with the following command and then browse to http://localhost:8080/workflow.html?localdata=large:

./bin/ambrose-demo

To run Ambrose with an actual Pig script, you'll need to build the Ambrose Pig distribution:

mvn package

You can then run the following commands to execute path/to/my/script.pig with an Ambrose app server embedded within the Pig client:

cd pig/target/ambrose-pig-$VERSION-bin/ambrose-pig-$VERSION
./bin/pig-ambrose -f path/to/my/script.pig

Note that this command delegates to the pig script present in your local installation of Pig, so make sure $PIG_HOME/bin is in your path. Now, browse to http://localhost:8080/web/workflow.html to see the progress of your script using the Ambrose UI. To override the default port, export AMBROSE_PORT before invoking pig-ambrose:

export AMBROSE_PORT=4567

An initial Ambrose release will be pushed to Maven Central once Pig 0.11 has been released.

Bug fixes, features, and documentation improvements are welcome! Please fork the project and send us a pull request on Github. You can submit issues on Github as well.

Here are some high-level goals we'd love to see contributions for:

• Improve the front-end client
• Add other visualization options
• Create a new back-end for a different runtime environment
• Create a standalone Ambrose server that's not embedded in the workflow client

For transparency and insight into our release cycle, releases will be numbered with the follow format:

<major>.<minor>.<patch>

And constructed with the following guidelines:

• Breaking backwards compatibility bumps the major
• New additions without breaking backwards compatibility bumps the minor
• Bug fixes and misc changes bump the patch

For more information on semantic versioning, please visit http://semver.org/.

• Bill Graham (@billgraham)
• Andy Schlaikjer (@sagemintblue)
• Nicolas Belmonte (@philogb)

Copyright 2013 Twitter, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0