This is nice, but the main reason I gave up on Cassandra was the difficulty of operating it. It's a far cry from, say, MySQL in terms of devops-friendliness. Curious how much work is being done in that respect.
Additionally, DataStax makes the "DataStax Community" distribution of Cassandra available for free, including for production use, which includes the OpsCenter management and monitoring tool: http://www.datastax.com/products/community