Before installing Impala through the Cloudera Manager interface, make sure all applicable nodes have the appropriate hardware configuration and levels of operating system and CDH. See Cloudera Impala Requirements for details.

For information on installing Impala in a Cloudera Manager-managed environment, see the Cloudera Manager Installation Guide for Cloudera Manager 5 or Cloudera Manager 4.

Managing your Impala installation through Cloudera Manager has a number of advantages. For example, when you make configuration changes to CDH components using Cloudera Manager, it automatically applies changes to the copies of configuration files, such as hive-site.xml, that Impala keeps under /etc/impala/conf. It also sets up the Hive metastore service that is required for Impala running under CDH 4.1.

In some cases, depending on the level of Impala, CDH, and Cloudera Manager, you might need to add particular component configuration details in some of the free-form option fields on the Impala configuration pages within Cloudera Manager. In Cloudera Manager 4, these fields are labelled Safety Valve; in Cloudera Manager 5, they are called Advanced Configuration Snippet.