This documentation is for Lenses 6 (preview). For Lenses 5.5 (stable) see here.

How Lenses Works

Lenses Architecture

Lenses has two components:

1

HQ

HQ is a central portal where end users interact with different environments (clusters). It provides a central place to explore data across many environments.

HQ is a single binary, installed on premise or in your cloud. From HQ you create environments, and for each environment, you deploy an agent that connects back to HQ.

Environments

Lenses defines each Kafka Cluster and supporting services, such as Schema Registries and Kafka Connect Clusters, as an environment.

You can have many environments, on premise, in the cloud, provided HQ has network access to the agent and the agent can connect to your Kafka cluster or any Kafka API compatible service.

Each environment has an agent. Environments can also be assigned extra metadata such as tiers, domains and descriptions.

2

Agents

There's a 1 to 1 relationship between environments, agents and Kafka clusters.

To explore and operate in an environment you need an agent. Agents are headless applications, deployed with connectivity to your Kafka cluster and supporting services.

Agents only ever communicate with HQ, using an Agent key over a secure channel. You can not, as a user, interact directly with them. End users are unaware of agents, only environments.

Agents require:

1. Agent Key to establish a communication channel to HQ

2. Connectivity to a Kafka cluster and credentials to do so.

The agents acts as a proxy to read, or write to your Kafka cluster, execute queries, monitor for alerts and manage SQL Processors and Kafka Connectors.