title: Health check for Cassandra connection (using hector)?
body: <p>For operations monitoring of my application, I am looking for something similar to the commonly used "SQL connection validation" query</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>SELECT 1;</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>in Cassandra, using the Hector driver. I have tried things like looking at Cluster.getKnownPoolHosts() and .getConnectionManager().getActivePools(). But it seems that their status is not continuously updated, only when I actually try to access Cassandra with a query.</p>
  
  <p>I'd like my health check to be independent of any keyspaces or user CFs that need to exist, so just running a "dummy" query seems difficult (against what?). And of course it shouldn't take a lot of memory or generate any significant load.</p>
  
  <p>Can I force Hector somehow to update its connection pool status without running a real query?</p>
  
  <p>(BTW: CQL doesn't even accept "SELECT 1" as a valid query.)</p>