5.4.1 About Job Analyzer

You can use Job Analyzer to decide whether a job is a candidate for load balancing with Perfect Balance. Job Analyzer uses the output logs of a MapReduce job to generate a simple report with statistics like the elapsed time and the load for each reduce task. By default, it uses the standard Hadoop counters displayed by the JobTracker user interface, but organizes the data to emphasize the relative performance and load of the reduce tasks, so that you can more easily interpret the results.

If the report shows that the data is skewed (that is, the reducers processed very different loads and the run times varied widely), then the application is a good candidate for Perfect Balance.