General Information.

Apache Ambari is a tool for provisioning, managing, and monitoring Apache Hadoop clusters. Ambari consists of a set of RESTful APIs and a browser-based management interface. 

Ambari enables System Administrators to:

• Provision a Hadoop Cluster
  Ambari provides an easy-to-use, step-by-step wizard for installing Hadoop services across any number of hosts.
  Ambari handles configuration of Hadoop services for the cluster.
• Manage a Hadoop Cluster
  Ambari provides central management for starting, stopping, and reconfiguring Hadoop services across the entire cluster.
• Monitor a Hadoop Cluster
  Ambari provides a dashboard for monitoring health and status of the Hadoop cluster.
  Ambari leverages Ganglia for metrics collection.
  Ambari leverages Nagios for system alerting and will send emails when your attention is needed (e.g., a node goes down, remaining disk space is low, etc).

Get started by following Quick Start Guide to deploy a multi-node cluster using Ambari.