Is there a way (preferably an exposed method accessible through Thrift), from a running Cassandra node to determine whether or not itself is "up"? (Per Cassandra standards, I'm assuming based on the gossip protocol). Another way to think of what I'm looking for is basically running "nodetool ring" just on myself, but I'm only interested in knowing whether I'm "Up" or "Down"?
I'm currently using the "describe_cluster" method, but earlier today when the commitlogs for a node filled up and it appeared down to the other nodes, describe_cluster() still worked fine, thus failing the check. Thanks, Suan
