Updated February 28, 2023
Introduction to Kafka Monitoring
Throughout the years, Kafka has evolved tremendously in terms of both size and functionality. It is important to incorporate a dedicated Kafka control to track its activities and efficiency as a key component in the IT infrastructure. Kafka monitoring tools such as the Kafka tracking tool by Applications Manager gather all performance metrics which can assist overcome Kafka issues, and it tells you which ones need corrective action. In this article, we would clarify various Kafka monitoring tools and how monitoring is performed in Kafka and the benefits of using such monitoring tools.
Kafka Monitoring Tools
With the growing need for control and management across the Kafka Cluster, a range of open-source and commercial interactive applications have entered the market, providing various functionalities for administration and tracking.
Let us explore some of the most popular monitoring tools in the market:
1. Confluent Control Centre
Confluent is a firm founded by Apache Kafka’s founders. Confluent Enterprise is a Kafka distribution mostly use for production environments. The Confluent Project commercial license comes with the Confluent Control Centre, which is Apache Kafka’s control framework, which enables user interface cluster monitoring and control. The Confluent Control Centre offers an insight into the inner workings and data flowing through the Apache Kafka clusters. Control Centre provides the administrator with monitoring and management capabilities to deliver optimal performance through the customized dashboards and meeting SLAs for its Apache Kafka clusters.
2. Yahoo Kafka Manager
Kafka Manager, developed at Yahoo, is a web-based management system for Kafka. This can manage several clusters; it can show statistics on single brokers or topics, such as messages per second, lags, and so on. But it’s more of an admin tool. You can’t use it to browse the messages, sadly. It also needs access to ZooKeeper nodes, and in certain production environments, where ZooKeeper nodes are normally firewalled, you might not be able to use them.
Here are a few of the things we can do with the Kafka Manager tool:
- Can create or delete topics with a different topic
- Can add partitions to existing
- Can filter out customers who do not have zookeeper ids/owners/offsets/
- Can manage multiple clusters and also can easily inspect clusters
3. LinkedIn Burrow
LinkedIn Burrow is Apache Kafka’s open-source monitoring partner, which provides user lag testing as a service without defining the threshold. It tracks all commodity offsets and measures customer status on demand. There is an HTTP endpoint for demanding status and other Kafka cluster information. Configurable notifiers may also submit statuses to another device via email or HTTP calls.
4.KafDrop
Kafdrop is an open-source web-based user interface to access Kafka topics, browse consumer groups, and monitor Apache Kafka clusters. The tool shows information like brokers, topics, partitions, users and allows you to access messages. Kafdrop’s skill is very close to the Kafka Manager’s but focuses more on enabling you to access broker information. Its characteristics are:
- To view Kafka brokers and its
- To browse messages and viewing consumer.
- Creating new topics and getting pieces of information about their
5. Kafka Tool
Kafka Tool is a GUI framework for Apache Kafka cluster management and use. It offers an intuitive user interface that easily accesses objects in a Kafka cluster and the cluster topics’ messages. This provides functionality targeted at developers and administrators.
How does Kafka Monitoring do?
All the Kafka components such as Kafka broker, topic, partition, producer and consumer have their metrics that are to be tracked. Following are some of the group of metrics that needs to be monitored
- Under Replicated Partitions
- Request Handlers
- Request timing
Under Replicated Partitions
Several partitions have problems with the ISR (in-sync replicas), which means they are not in-sync. Suppose you have a lot of partitions that are under replicated. In that case, that means it may suggest that your machine has a high load or is lagging, or one of your brokers is having difficulties or just not functioning correctly. You may have to restart, So monitoring the under replicated partitions is an excellent indicator to understand if your clusters’ doing well or not.
Request Handlers
Basically, there will be writing and read from topics in your Kafka cluster, creating from network doing replying and request. This will utilize the threads, so you want to make sure that these threads are not busy. If not, you need to add threads and even add additional servers to keep your Kafka brokers up to load.
Request timing
You need to monitor the latency. Suppose the latency is low, the best. And people monitor the 99.9% of latency to ensure that the word message still takes less than 200ms to reach your consumers. In short, how long does it take to reply to requests?
Importance of using Kafka Monitoring tools
Kafka transfers data via a platform-independent protocol. Its problems are language and application variations, the handling and communication of cloud-based components, the volume and variety of data types, and the Kafka solution variations between servers and data centres. Things to watch for include timely delivery of data, overall application performance, knowing when to scale up, connectivity issues, and ensuring that data is not lost.
Note the various types of components in planning a Kafka monitoring approach, including:
- Producers and consumers (also known as publishers and subscribers)
- Message size and data types
- Data transfer brokers and servers.
- Different platforms and their programming language
- Network Architecture
Conclusion
So far, we can conclude that we have learned are different tools for Kafka Monitoring. We have also discussed various tools of Kafka monitoring. We learned about a few important metrics to be considered while monitoring Kafka via the tool and how important it is to use such tools.
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This is a guide to Kafka Monitoring. Here we discuss an introduction to Kafka Monitoring and the top 5 Tools, how it works, and the importance of using it. You can also go through our other related articles to learn more –
