With the increase use of Hadoop comes an increase in the need for critical safeguards, especially in the financial industry where any data loss could mean millions in penalties. What happens when parts of an Hadoop cluster goes down? How do Hadoop based solutions for the financial industry cope with NameNode failures? We will share the failover issues we’ve encountered and best practices for performing continuous health monitoring, best suited for the financial industry. In addition, we will cover ZooKeeper-based failover for NameNode and other related SPOF services (e.g., JobTracker, Oozie, Kerberos).