Aspects of the present disclosure involve, a customizable system and infrastructure which can used to retrieve and scout metadata on a distributed file system for data management. In one embodiment, a system is introduced which can be used to scout metadata from a distributed file system using an isolated node which can enable the determination and response to customized queries. The customizable system can include a NameNodeAnalytics module which can stream, filter, and process client queries without locking the NameNode in the distributed file system. In another embodiment, the analytics distributed file system can communicate with a streaming API and other time-series module for the reporting and visual representation of the metrics obtained.