Metrics try infinitely times if the Cassandra is up, while inventory and alerts only 15 times. If you forget to start the C* w/ ccm and you are not fast enough, you have to restart also the services.

inventory:

14:06:11,604 WARN [org.hawkular.inventory.cdi] (ServerService Thread Pool – 68) HAWKINV003501: Inventory backend failed to initialize in an attempt 1 of 15 with message: Could not instantiate implementation: com.thinkaurelius.titan.diskstorage.cassandra.thrift.CassandraThriftStoreManager.
14:06:12,198 WARN [org.hawkular.alerts.engine.impl.CassDefinitionsServiceImpl] (Thread-60 (ActiveMQ-client-global-threads-1514490933)) Could not connect to Cassandra cluster - assuming is not up yet. Cause: com.datastax.driver.core.exceptions.NoHostAvailableException: All host(s) tried for query failed (tried: /127.0.0.1:9042 (com.datastax.driver.core.exceptions.TransportException: [/127.0.0.1] Cannot connect))
14:06:12,198 WARN [org.hawkular.alerts.engine.impl.CassDefinitionsServiceImpl] (Thread-60 (ActiveMQ-client-global-threads-1514490933)) [14] Retrying connecting to Cassandra cluster in [3000]ms...

alerts:

14:06:53,628 WARN [org.hawkular.inventory.cdi] (ServerService Thread Pool – 68) HAWKINV003501: Inventory backend failed to initialize in an attempt 15 of 15 with message: Could not instantiate implementation: com.thinkaurelius.titan.diskstorage.cassandra.thrift.CassandraThriftStoreManager.
14:06:54,376 WARN [org.hawkular.alerts.engine.impl.CassDefinitionsServiceImpl] (Thread-60 (ActiveMQ-client-global-threads-1514490933)) Could not connect to Cassandra cluster - assuming is not up yet. Cause: com.datastax.driver.core.exceptions.NoHostAvailableException: All host(s) tried for query failed (tried: /127.0.0.1:9042 (com.datastax.driver.core.exceptions.TransportException: [/127.0.0.1] Cannot connect))

metrics:

14:08:08,806 WARN [org.hawkular.metrics.api.jaxrs.MetricsServiceLifecycle] (metricsservice-lifecycle-thread) HAWKMETRICS200003: Could not connect to Cassandra cluster - assuming its not up yet: All host(s) tried for query failed (tried: /127.0.0.1:9042 (com.datastax.driver.core.exceptions.TransportException: [/127.0.0.1] Cannot connect))
14:08:08,806 WARN [org.hawkular.metrics.api.jaxrs.MetricsServiceLifecycle] (metricsservice-lifecycle-thread) HAWKMETRICS200004: [50] Retrying connecting to Cassandra cluster in [2]s...