= Diving Deep, Use External Tools

Machine access allows operators to dive even deeper than logs and
`nodetool` allow. While every Cassandra operator may have their personal
favorite toolsets for troubleshooting issues, this page contains some of
the most common operator techniques and examples of those tools. Many of
these commands work only on Linux, but if you are deploying on a
different operating system you may have access to other substantially
similar tools that assess similar OS level metrics and processes.

== JVM Tooling

The JVM ships with a number of useful tools. Some of them are useful for
debugging Cassandra issues, especially related to heap and execution
stacks.

*NOTE*: There are two common gotchas with JVM tooling and Cassandra:

[arabic]
. By default Cassandra ships with `-XX:+PerfDisableSharedMem` set to
prevent long pauses (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-9242[CASSANDRA-9242] and https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-9483[CASSANDRA-9483] for
details). If you want to use JVM tooling you can instead have `/tmp`
mounted on an in memory `tmpfs` which also effectively works around
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-9242[CASSANDRA-9242] .
. Make sure you run the tools as the same user as Cassandra is running
as, e.g. if the database is running as `cassandra` the tool also has to
be run as `cassandra`, e.g. via `sudo -u cassandra <cmd>`.

=== Garbage Collection State (jstat)

If you suspect heap pressure you can use `jstat` to dive deep into the
garbage collection state of a Cassandra process. This command is always
safe to run and yields detailed heap information including eden heap
usage (E), old generation heap usage (O), count of eden collections
(YGC), time spend in eden collections (YGCT), old/mixed generation
collections (FGC) and time spent in old/mixed generation collections
(FGCT):

[source, bash]
----
jstat -gcutil <cassandra pid> 500ms
 S0     S1     E      O      M     CCS    YGC     YGCT    FGC    FGCT     GCT
 0.00   0.00  81.53  31.16  93.07  88.20     12    0.151     3    0.257    0.408
 0.00   0.00  82.36  31.16  93.07  88.20     12    0.151     3    0.257    0.408
 0.00   0.00  82.36  31.16  93.07  88.20     12    0.151     3    0.257    0.408
 0.00   0.00  83.19  31.16  93.07  88.20     12    0.151     3    0.257    0.408
 0.00   0.00  83.19  31.16  93.07  88.20     12    0.151     3    0.257    0.408
 0.00   0.00  84.19  31.16  93.07  88.20     12    0.151     3    0.257    0.408
 0.00   0.00  84.19  31.16  93.07  88.20     12    0.151     3    0.257    0.408
 0.00   0.00  85.03  31.16  93.07  88.20     12    0.151     3    0.257    0.408
 0.00   0.00  85.03  31.16  93.07  88.20     12    0.151     3    0.257    0.408
 0.00   0.00  85.94  31.16  93.07  88.20     12    0.151     3    0.257    0.408
----

In this case we see we have a relatively healthy heap profile, with
31.16% old generation heap usage and 83% eden. If the old generation
routinely is above 75% then you probably need more heap (assuming CMS
with a 75% occupancy threshold). If you do have such persistently high
old gen that often means you either have under-provisioned the old
generation heap, or that there is too much live data on heap for
Cassandra to collect (e.g. because of memtables). Another thing to watch
for is time between young garbage collections (YGC), which indicate how
frequently the eden heap is collected. Each young gc pause is about
20-50ms, so if you have a lot of them your clients will notice in their
high percentile latencies.

=== Thread Information (jstack)

To get a point in time snapshot of exactly what Cassandra is doing, run
`jstack` against the Cassandra PID. *Note* that this does pause the JVM
for a very brief period (<20ms).:

[source, bash]
----
$ jstack <cassandra pid> > threaddump

# display the threaddump
$ cat threaddump

# look at runnable threads
$grep RUNNABLE threaddump -B 1
"Attach Listener" #15 daemon prio=9 os_prio=0 tid=0x00007f829c001000 nid=0x3a74 waiting on condition [0x0000000000000000]
   java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE
--
"DestroyJavaVM" #13 prio=5 os_prio=0 tid=0x00007f82e800e000 nid=0x2a19 waiting on condition [0x0000000000000000]
   java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE
--
"JPS thread pool" #10 prio=5 os_prio=0 tid=0x00007f82e84d0800 nid=0x2a2c runnable [0x00007f82d0856000]
   java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE
--
"Service Thread" #9 daemon prio=9 os_prio=0 tid=0x00007f82e80d7000 nid=0x2a2a runnable [0x0000000000000000]
   java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE
--
"C1 CompilerThread3" #8 daemon prio=9 os_prio=0 tid=0x00007f82e80cc000 nid=0x2a29 waiting on condition [0x0000000000000000]
   java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE
--

# Note that the nid is the Linux thread id
----

Some of the most important information in the threaddumps are
waiting/blocking threads, including what locks or monitors the thread is
blocking/waiting on.

== Basic OS Tooling

A great place to start when debugging a Cassandra issue is understanding
how Cassandra is interacting with system resources. The following are
all resources that Cassandra makes heavy uses of:

* CPU cores. For executing concurrent user queries
* CPU processing time. For query activity (data decompression, row
merging, etc.)
* CPU processing time (low priority). For background tasks (compaction,
streaming, etc ...)
* RAM for Java Heap. Used to hold internal data-structures and by
default the Cassandra memtables. Heap space is a crucial component of
write performance as well as generally.
* RAM for OS disk cache. Used to cache frequently accessed SSTable
blocks. OS disk cache is a crucial component of read performance.
* Disks. Cassandra cares a lot about disk read latency, disk write
throughput, and of course disk space.
* Network latency. Cassandra makes many internode requests, so network
latency between nodes can directly impact performance.
* Network throughput. Cassandra (as other databases) frequently have the
so called "incast" problem where a small request (e.g.
`SELECT * from foo.bar`) returns a massively large result set (e.g. the
entire dataset). In such situations outgoing bandwidth is crucial.

Often troubleshooting Cassandra comes down to troubleshooting what
resource the machine or cluster is running out of. Then you create more
of that resource or change the query pattern to make less use of that
resource.

=== High Level Resource Usage (top/htop)

Cassandra makes signifiant use of system resources, and often the very
first useful action is to run `top` or `htop`
(https://hisham.hm/htop/[website])to see the state of the machine.

Useful things to look at:

* System load levels. While these numbers can be confusing, generally
speaking if the load average is greater than the number of CPU cores,
Cassandra probably won't have very good (sub 100 millisecond) latencies.
See
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-08-08/linux-load-averages.html[Linux
Load Averages] for more information.
* CPU utilization. `htop` in particular can help break down CPU
utilization into `user` (low and normal priority), `system` (kernel),
and `io-wait` . Cassandra query threads execute as normal priority
`user` threads, while compaction threads execute as low priority `user`
threads. High `system` time could indicate problems like thread
contention, and high `io-wait` may indicate slow disk drives. This can
help you understand what Cassandra is spending processing resources
doing.
* Memory usage. Look for which programs have the most resident memory,
it is probably Cassandra. The number for Cassandra is likely
inaccurately high due to how Linux (as of 2018) accounts for memory
mapped file memory.

[[os-iostat]]
=== IO Usage (iostat)

Use iostat to determine how data drives are faring, including latency
distributions, throughput, and utilization:

[source, bash]
----
$ sudo iostat -xdm 2
Linux 4.13.0-13-generic (hostname)     07/03/2018     _x86_64_    (8 CPU)

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rMB/s    wMB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
sda               0.00     0.28    0.32    5.42     0.01     0.13    48.55     0.01    2.21    0.26    2.32   0.64   0.37
sdb               0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00     0.00     0.00    79.34     0.00    0.20    0.20    0.00   0.16   0.00
sdc               0.34     0.27    0.76    0.36     0.01     0.02    47.56     0.03   26.90    2.98   77.73   9.21   1.03

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rMB/s    wMB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
sda               0.00     0.00    2.00   32.00     0.01     4.04   244.24     0.54   16.00    0.00   17.00   1.06   3.60
sdb               0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00     0.00     0.00     0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   0.00   0.00
sdc               0.00    24.50    0.00  114.00     0.00    11.62   208.70     5.56   48.79    0.00   48.79   1.12  12.80
----

In this case we can see that `/dev/sdc1` is a very slow drive, having an
`await` close to 50 milliseconds and an `avgqu-sz` close to 5 ios. The
drive is not particularly saturated (utilization is only 12.8%), but we
should still be concerned about how this would affect our p99 latency
since 50ms is quite long for typical Cassandra operations. That being
said, in this case most of the latency is present in writes (typically
writes are more latent than reads), which due to the LSM nature of
Cassandra is often hidden from the user.

Important metrics to assess using iostat:

* Reads and writes per second. These numbers will change with the
workload, but generally speaking the more reads Cassandra has to do from
disk the slower Cassandra read latencies are. Large numbers of reads per
second can be a dead giveaway that the cluster has insufficient memory
for OS page caching.
* Write throughput. Cassandra's LSM model defers user writes and batches
them together, which means that throughput to the underlying medium is
the most important write metric for Cassandra.
* Read latency (`r_await`). When Cassandra missed the OS page cache and
reads from SSTables, the read latency directly determines how fast
Cassandra can respond with the data.
* Write latency. Cassandra is less sensitive to write latency except
when it syncs the commit log. This typically enters into the very high
percentiles of write latency.

Note that to get detailed latency breakdowns you will need a more
advanced tool such as xref:cassandra:troubleshooting/use_tools.adoc#use-bcc-tools[`bcc-tools`].

=== OS page Cache Usage

As Cassandra makes heavy use of memory mapped files, the health of the
operating system's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_cache[Page Cache]
is crucial to performance. Start by finding how much available cache is
in the system:

[source, bash]
----
$ free -g
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:             15           9           2           0           3           5
Swap:             0           0           0
----

In this case 9GB of memory is used by user processes (Cassandra heap)
and 8GB is available for OS page cache. Of that, 3GB is actually used to
cache files. If most memory is used and unavailable to the page cache,
Cassandra performance can suffer significantly. This is why Cassandra
starts with a reasonably small amount of memory reserved for the heap.

If you suspect that you are missing the OS page cache frequently you can
use advanced tools like xref:cassandra:troubleshooting/use_tools.adoc#use-bcc-tools[cachestat] or
xref:cassandra:troubleshooting/use_tools.adoc#use-vmtouch[vmtouch] to dive deeper.

=== Network Latency and Reliability

Whenever Cassandra does writes or reads that involve other replicas,
`LOCAL_QUORUM` reads for example, one of the dominant effects on latency
is network latency. When trying to debug issues with multi machine
operations, the network can be an important resource to investigate. You
can determine internode latency using tools like `ping` and `traceroute`
or most effectively `mtr`:

[source, bash]
----
$ mtr -nr www.google.com
Start: Sun Jul 22 13:10:28 2018
HOST: hostname                     Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- 192.168.1.1                0.0%    10    2.0   1.9   1.1   3.7   0.7
  2.|-- 96.123.29.15               0.0%    10   11.4  11.0   9.0  16.4   1.9
  3.|-- 68.86.249.21               0.0%    10   10.6  10.7   9.0  13.7   1.1
  4.|-- 162.141.78.129             0.0%    10   11.5  10.6   9.6  12.4   0.7
  5.|-- 162.151.78.253             0.0%    10   10.9  12.1  10.4  20.2   2.8
  6.|-- 68.86.143.93               0.0%    10   12.4  12.6   9.9  23.1   3.8
  7.|-- 96.112.146.18              0.0%    10   11.9  12.4  10.6  15.5   1.6
  9.|-- 209.85.252.250             0.0%    10   13.7  13.2  12.5  13.9   0.0
 10.|-- 108.170.242.238            0.0%    10   12.7  12.4  11.1  13.0   0.5
 11.|-- 74.125.253.149             0.0%    10   13.4  13.7  11.8  19.2   2.1
 12.|-- 216.239.62.40              0.0%    10   13.4  14.7  11.5  26.9   4.6
 13.|-- 108.170.242.81             0.0%    10   14.4  13.2  10.9  16.0   1.7
 14.|-- 72.14.239.43               0.0%    10   12.2  16.1  11.0  32.8   7.1
 15.|-- 216.58.195.68              0.0%    10   25.1  15.3  11.1  25.1   4.8
----

In this example of `mtr`, we can rapidly assess the path that your
packets are taking, as well as what their typical loss and latency are.
Packet loss typically leads to between `200ms` and `3s` of additional
latency, so that can be a common cause of latency issues.

=== Network Throughput

As Cassandra is sensitive to outgoing bandwidth limitations, sometimes
it is useful to determine if network throughput is limited. One handy
tool to do this is
https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-iftop/[iftop] which shows
both bandwidth usage as well as connection information at a glance. An
example showing traffic during a stress run against a local `ccm`
cluster:

[source, bash]
----
$ # remove the -t for ncurses instead of pure text
$ sudo iftop -nNtP -i lo
interface: lo
IP address is: 127.0.0.1
MAC address is: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Listening on lo
   # Host name (port/service if enabled)            last 2s   last 10s   last 40s cumulative
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   1 127.0.0.1:58946                          =>      869Kb      869Kb      869Kb      217KB
     127.0.0.3:9042                           <=         0b         0b         0b         0B
   2 127.0.0.1:54654                          =>      736Kb      736Kb      736Kb      184KB
     127.0.0.1:9042                           <=         0b         0b         0b         0B
   3 127.0.0.1:51186                          =>      669Kb      669Kb      669Kb      167KB
     127.0.0.2:9042                           <=         0b         0b         0b         0B
   4 127.0.0.3:9042                           =>     3.30Kb     3.30Kb     3.30Kb       845B
     127.0.0.1:58946                          <=         0b         0b         0b         0B
   5 127.0.0.1:9042                           =>     2.79Kb     2.79Kb     2.79Kb       715B
     127.0.0.1:54654                          <=         0b         0b         0b         0B
   6 127.0.0.2:9042                           =>     2.54Kb     2.54Kb     2.54Kb       650B
     127.0.0.1:51186                          <=         0b         0b         0b         0B
   7 127.0.0.1:36894                          =>     1.65Kb     1.65Kb     1.65Kb       423B
     127.0.0.5:7000                           <=         0b         0b         0b         0B
   8 127.0.0.1:38034                          =>     1.50Kb     1.50Kb     1.50Kb       385B
     127.0.0.2:7000                           <=         0b         0b         0b         0B
   9 127.0.0.1:56324                          =>     1.50Kb     1.50Kb     1.50Kb       383B
     127.0.0.1:7000                           <=         0b         0b         0b         0B
  10 127.0.0.1:53044                          =>     1.43Kb     1.43Kb     1.43Kb       366B
     127.0.0.4:7000                           <=         0b         0b         0b         0B
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total send rate:                                     2.25Mb     2.25Mb     2.25Mb
Total receive rate:                                      0b         0b         0b
Total send and receive rate:                         2.25Mb     2.25Mb     2.25Mb
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peak rate (sent/received/total):                     2.25Mb         0b     2.25Mb
Cumulative (sent/received/total):                     576KB         0B      576KB
============================================================================================
----

In this case we can see that bandwidth is fairly shared between many
peers, but if the total was getting close to the rated capacity of the
NIC or was focussed on a single client, that may indicate a clue as to
what issue is occurring.

== Advanced tools

Sometimes as an operator you may need to really dive deep. This is where
advanced OS tooling can come in handy.

[[use-bcc-tools]]
=== bcc-tools

Most modern Linux distributions (kernels newer than `4.1`) support
https://github.com/iovisor/bcc[bcc-tools] for diving deep into
performance problems. First install `bcc-tools`, e.g. via `apt` on
Debian:

[source, bash]
----
$ apt install bcc-tools
----

Then you can use all the tools that `bcc-tools` contains. One of the
most useful tools is `cachestat`
(https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/blob/master/tools/cachestat_example.txt[cachestat
examples]) which allows you to determine exactly how many OS page cache
hits and misses are happening:

[source, bash]
----
$ sudo /usr/share/bcc/tools/cachestat -T 1
TIME        TOTAL   MISSES     HITS  DIRTIES   BUFFERS_MB  CACHED_MB
18:44:08       66       66        0       64           88       4427
18:44:09       40       40        0       75           88       4427
18:44:10     4353       45     4308      203           88       4427
18:44:11       84       77        7       13           88       4428
18:44:12     2511       14     2497       14           88       4428
18:44:13      101       98        3       18           88       4428
18:44:14    16741        0    16741       58           88       4428
18:44:15     1935       36     1899       18           88       4428
18:44:16       89       34       55       18           88       4428
----

In this case there are not too many page cache `MISSES` which indicates
a reasonably sized cache. These metrics are the most direct measurement
of your Cassandra node's "hot" dataset. If you don't have enough cache,
`MISSES` will be high and performance will be slow. If you have enough
cache, `MISSES` will be low and performance will be fast (as almost all
reads are being served out of memory).

You can also measure disk latency distributions using `biolatency`
(https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/blob/master/tools/biolatency_example.txt[biolatency
examples]) to get an idea of how slow Cassandra will be when reads miss
the OS page Cache and have to hit disks:

[source, bash]
----
$ sudo /usr/share/bcc/tools/biolatency -D 10
Tracing block device I/O... Hit Ctrl-C to end.


disk = 'sda'
     usecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 0        |                                        |
         2 -> 3          : 0        |                                        |
         4 -> 7          : 0        |                                        |
         8 -> 15         : 0        |                                        |
        16 -> 31         : 12       |****************************************|
        32 -> 63         : 9        |******************************          |
        64 -> 127        : 1        |***                                     |
       128 -> 255        : 3        |**********                              |
       256 -> 511        : 7        |***********************                 |
       512 -> 1023       : 2        |******                                  |

disk = 'sdc'
     usecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 0        |                                        |
         2 -> 3          : 0        |                                        |
         4 -> 7          : 0        |                                        |
         8 -> 15         : 0        |                                        |
        16 -> 31         : 0        |                                        |
        32 -> 63         : 0        |                                        |
        64 -> 127        : 41       |************                            |
       128 -> 255        : 17       |*****                                   |
       256 -> 511        : 13       |***                                     |
       512 -> 1023       : 2        |                                        |
      1024 -> 2047       : 0        |                                        |
      2048 -> 4095       : 0        |                                        |
      4096 -> 8191       : 56       |*****************                       |
      8192 -> 16383      : 131      |****************************************|
     16384 -> 32767      : 9        |**                                      |
----

In this case most ios on the data drive (`sdc`) are fast, but many take
between 8 and 16 milliseconds.

Finally `biosnoop`
(https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/blob/master/tools/biosnoop_example.txt[examples])
can be used to dive even deeper and see per IO latencies:

[source, bash]
----
$ sudo /usr/share/bcc/tools/biosnoop | grep java | head
0.000000000    java           17427  sdc     R  3972458600 4096      13.58
0.000818000    java           17427  sdc     R  3972459408 4096       0.35
0.007098000    java           17416  sdc     R  3972401824 4096       5.81
0.007896000    java           17416  sdc     R  3972489960 4096       0.34
0.008920000    java           17416  sdc     R  3972489896 4096       0.34
0.009487000    java           17427  sdc     R  3972401880 4096       0.32
0.010238000    java           17416  sdc     R  3972488368 4096       0.37
0.010596000    java           17427  sdc     R  3972488376 4096       0.34
0.011236000    java           17410  sdc     R  3972488424 4096       0.32
0.011825000    java           17427  sdc     R  3972488576 16384      0.65
... time passes
8.032687000    java           18279  sdc     R  10899712  122880     3.01
8.033175000    java           18279  sdc     R  10899952  8192       0.46
8.073295000    java           18279  sdc     R  23384320  122880     3.01
8.073768000    java           18279  sdc     R  23384560  8192       0.46
----

With `biosnoop` you see every single IO and how long they take. This
data can be used to construct the latency distributions in `biolatency`
but can also be used to better understand how disk latency affects
performance. For example this particular drive takes ~3ms to service a
memory mapped read due to the large default value (`128kb`) of
`read_ahead_kb`. To improve point read performance you may may want to
decrease `read_ahead_kb` on fast data volumes such as SSDs while keeping
the a higher value like `128kb` value is probably right for HDs. There
are tradeoffs involved, see
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt[queue-sysfs]
docs for more information, but regardless `biosnoop` is useful for
understanding _how_ Cassandra uses drives.

[[use-vmtouch]]
=== vmtouch

Sometimes it's useful to know how much of the Cassandra data files are
being cached by the OS. A great tool for answering this question is
https://github.com/hoytech/vmtouch[vmtouch].

First install it:

[source, bash]
----
$ git clone https://github.com/hoytech/vmtouch.git
$ cd vmtouch
$ make
----

Then run it on the Cassandra data directory:

[source, bash]
----
$ ./vmtouch /var/lib/cassandra/data/
           Files: 312
     Directories: 92
  Resident Pages: 62503/64308  244M/251M  97.2%
         Elapsed: 0.005657 seconds
----

In this case almost the entire dataset is hot in OS page Cache.
Generally speaking the percentage doesn't really matter unless reads are
missing the cache (per e.g. xref:cassandra:troubleshooting/use_tools.adoc#use-bcc-tools[cachestat] in which case
having additional memory may help read performance.

=== CPU Flamegraphs

Cassandra often uses a lot of CPU, but telling _what_ it is doing can
prove difficult. One of the best ways to analyze Cassandra on CPU time
is to use
http://www.brendangregg.com/FlameGraphs/cpuflamegraphs.html[CPU
Flamegraphs] which display in a useful way which areas of Cassandra code
are using CPU. This may help narrow down a compaction problem to a
"compaction problem dropping tombstones" or just generally help you
narrow down what Cassandra is doing while it is having an issue. To get
CPU flamegraphs follow the instructions for
http://www.brendangregg.com/FlameGraphs/cpuflamegraphs.html#Java[Java
Flamegraphs].

Generally:

[arabic]
. Enable the `-XX:+PreserveFramePointer` option in Cassandra's
`jvm.options` configuation file. This has a negligible performance
impact but allows you actually see what Cassandra is doing.
. Run `perf` to get some data.
. Send that data through the relevant scripts in the FlameGraph toolset
and convert the data into a pretty flamegraph. View the resulting SVG
image in a browser or other image browser.

For example just cloning straight off github we first install the
`perf-map-agent` to the location of our JVMs (assumed to be
`/usr/lib/jvm`):

[source, bash]
----
$ sudo bash
$ export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle/
$ cd /usr/lib/jvm
$ git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/jvm-profiling-tools/perf-map-agent
$ cd perf-map-agent
$ cmake .
$ make
----

Now to get a flamegraph:

[source, bash]
----
$ git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/brendangregg/FlameGraph
$ sudo bash
$ cd FlameGraph
$ # Record traces of Cassandra and map symbols for all java processes
$ perf record -F 49 -a -g -p <CASSANDRA PID> -- sleep 30; ./jmaps
$ # Translate the data
$ perf script > cassandra_stacks
$ cat cassandra_stacks | ./stackcollapse-perf.pl | grep -v cpu_idle | \
    ./flamegraph.pl --color=java --hash > cassandra_flames.svg
----

The resulting SVG is searchable, zoomable, and generally easy to
introspect using a browser.

[[packet-capture]]
=== Packet Capture

Sometimes you have to understand what queries a Cassandra node is
performing _right now_ to troubleshoot an issue. For these times trusty
packet capture tools like `tcpdump` and
https://www.wireshark.org/[Wireshark] can be very helpful to dissect
packet captures. Wireshark even has native
https://www.wireshark.org/docs/dfref/c/cql.html[CQL support] although it
sometimes has compatibility issues with newer Cassandra protocol
releases.

To get a packet capture first capture some packets:

[source, bash]
----
$ sudo tcpdump -U -s0 -i <INTERFACE> -w cassandra.pcap -n "tcp port 9042"
----

Now open it up with wireshark:

[source, bash]
----
$ wireshark cassandra.pcap
----

If you don't see CQL like statements try telling to decode as CQL by
right clicking on a packet going to 9042 -> `Decode as` -> select CQL
from the dropdown for port 9042.

If you don't want to do this manually or use a GUI, you can also use
something like https://github.com/jolynch/cqltrace[cqltrace] to ease
obtaining and parsing CQL packet captures.
