Troubleshooting random node latency spikes

Greetings! I'm working on setting up a new cassandra cluster with a write-heavy workload (50% writes), and I've run into a strange spiky latency problem. My application metrics showed random latency spikes. I tracked the latency back to spikes on individual cassandra nodes. ClientRequest.Latency

ring describe returns only public ips

We are using Cassandra 1.2.13 in a multi-datacenter setup. We are using Astyanax as the client, and we’d like to enable its token aware connection pool type and ring describe node discovery type. Unfortunately, I’ve found that both thrift’s describe_ring and `nodetool ring` only report the publi