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Kafka Monitoring UI

Lenses Kafka Monitoring tool provides pre-defined templates, that use

  • A Time Series database (Prometheus)
  • Custom JMX exporters
  • A Data Visualization application (Grafana)
  • Built in domain intelligence about operating Kafka with confidence in production

Whilst Lenses continuously monitor the attached Kafka cluster and provide alerts for important metrics degradation, such as consumer lag and offline or underreplicated partitions, it does not strive to become a timeseries database since established solutions from domain experts do exist.

The monitoring reference setup for Apache Kafka is thus based on Prometheus and Grafana software with a medium term goal to bring more dashboards from Grafana into Lenses.

A question that comes up often, is whether monitoring is really needed since Lenses can provide alerts. This should be answered eventually by each implementation team.

Keep your alerts and key metrics to a small tight set, so that you won’t get overwhelmed. This is a good, common advice and what we want to achieve through Lenses, alas it is also prone to misconceptions.

Alerts and key metrics are related to monitoring but are not the same. We define monitoring as the process of collecting a large number of metrics and storing them for a period of time. Queries to these data help engineers understand the cluster better, establish baselines so they can plan for additional capacity or act on deviations, or even extract new, important key metrics for a specific usecase as the team acquire more experience in the field. Furthermore new alerts can be added to any metric —or combination of them.

Kafka Cluster Metrics 

A 360-degree of the key metrics of your Kafka cluster curated into a single template, that allows to time travel between the past 60 days (by default) of key metrics, and pro-actively receive alerts and notifications when your streaming platform is under pressure, or signals of partial failures appear.

Kafka Monitoring Grafana

Consumer Producer Metrics 

All Kafka Consumer or Producer dashboard to include all metrics for Kafka brokers, Zookeeper, Schema Registry, Connect Distributed, REST Proxy, Lenses and any other JVM application that is connected to Lenses Monitoring.

Kafka Consumer Producer Metrics

Hard Disk Usage Metrics 

A dashboard to display the approximate metrics about the size (in bytes) of your topics. It is useful for planning disk capacity and having an overview of each topic’s size. The “Data Stored per Broker” graph can be used to detect storage imbalances between brokers.

Kafka Disk Space monitoring

Client Application Monitoring 

Operational metrics from your JVM-based Kafka applications. You can use it to monitor performance and usage of system resources in order to detect issues early. Full access to how JVM apps and the Garbage Collector behaves, as well as open file descriptors, and other critical aspects of your own applications.

Kafka Client Application Monitoring

Messages Per Topic 

A simple dashboard to display the messages per topic. It highlight when segment deletion occurs as per the file size based or time based retention policies.

Kafka Messages per topic monitoring

Kafka Services monitoring 

Kafka brokers, Zookeeper, Connect clusters and optionally the Schema Registry are key services in your streaming platform. Lenses provides details and key health metrics on each. You can see an overview on the main dashboard and by selecting the Services option in the side menu.

Alerts are raised on key metrics which are also displayed on the main dashboard. Metrics are updated in realtime.

Brokers monitoring 

Broker health and metrics are displayed on the Broker tab, by selecting a broker you can further drill into details about that specific broker, for example topic and partition information this broker is responsible for and message ingest rates.

Kafka Broker health
Kafka Broker health details

Zookeeper monitoring 

Zookeeper health and metrics are provided on the Zookeeper tab.

Zookeeper health

Schema Registry monitoring 

Zookeeper health and metrics are provided on the Schema Registry tab.

Schema Registry monitoring

Kafka Connect monitoring 

Connect health and metrics are provided on the Connect Clusters tab.

Kafka Connect monitoring

Features 

The Monitoring Lens, adds a set of additional features including:

  • HTTPS / Certificate support
  • Predictive algorithms to alert before a failure occurs
  • Alert integration with Slack, PagerDuty, Email and other integrations
  • LDAP integration
Kafka Monitoring and Alerting