Launching notebooks

Launch a notebook that you added to an instance group for browser-based data analysis.

Before you begin

  • You must be a cluster or consumer administrator, consumer user, or have the Spark Applications Submit permission to launch notebooks.
  • Your user account must be assigned to the notebook as the owner or as a collaborator. For more information, see Assigning notebooks to owners.

About this task

When you start an instance group that is associated with notebooks, any notebooks assigned to users are started. You can also start notebooks independent of the instance group start operation.

Once a notebook service is started, you can launch a notebook to open the notebook service instance.

Note: Some notebooks, such as Zeppelin and Jupyter, require access to the Internet to download supporting files from their UI. To create notes once you launch the notebook, ensure that your browser can connect to the Internet. Check your firewall settings also to ensure permission to access sites from which files are downloaded.

If monitoring is enabled for the notebook and if SSL is enabled in your cluster (default), you might see a blank screen if your browser's settings block insecure content. To properly display the notebook, update your browser's settings to enable insecure content. Check your browser documentation for details. Monitoring is not supported for Jupyter notebooks.

Based on your permissions, you can launch notebooks from the My Notebooks (or My Notebooks & Applications) page and the Instance Groups page. For a list of permissions required to launch notebooks from the Instance Groups page, see Permission list.

Procedure

  1. From the cluster management console, open the notebook type:
    • From the My Notebooks (or My Notebooks & Applications) page, under Open Notebook, select a notebook type associated with an instance group.
    • From the Instance Groups page, click the instance group; then, under the Notebooks tab, click My Notebooks and select a notebook type associated with the instance group.
  2. If prompted for authentication, enter the user account and password assigned to you as the notebook owner or collaborator.
    Note: The Jupyter notebook does not automatically log out a user following a period of inactivity. As a result, the logged-in user does not have to re-enter the password if the web browser window is still open. To avoid potential security issues, ensure that you always log out from the Jupyter notebook (click Logout within the notebook) or clear the web browser cache.

What to do next

Create notes and submit queries as required for data analysis.
After a Jupyter notebook is started, the default name of the SparkContext is pysparkshell. You can rename the SparkContext by adding the following commands in each created note of a notebook; the value of appName is the name that you want to set for the SparkContext: 
  sc.stop()             
  sc = SparkContext(appName="Userdefinedsc")