Hands-On Walk Through of Community Edition
Follow a short walkthrough of the Lenses 6 interface and connect your first environment.
This walk through builds on Setting Up Community Edition.
It helps you get from first sign-in to a working environment.
The local stack starts:
Lenses HQ for the UI and control plane
Lenses Agent for secure connectivity
Kafka services for local exploration
Postgres for persistent storage
What you will do
In this walk through, you will:
Sign in to Community Edition
Learn the basic layout
Open a demo environment or add your own
Inspect environment health
Search for topics and resources
If you used the Docker quick start, a demo environment may already exist.
If you used Helm or a manual install, add your own environment first.
Sign in to Community Edition
Open http://localhost:9991.
Sign in with:
Username: admin
Password: adminOn first sign-in, you may need to:
Accept the Terms of Use
Accept the Privacy Policy
Learn the basic layout
Lenses uses an IDE-style layout.
Use the explorer to browse environments and resources
Use the workspace to open tabs and inspect data
Use the top bar for search and setup actions
This page focuses on the first-run flow.
The main left bar gives access to:
Search: Search across resources and open in the workspace
Environments & Topics: Topics / Schemas, SQL queries, Kafka ACLs & Topics, Policies, Audits & Alerts, Agent configuration & logs.
Apps: Kafka Connectors, SQL Processors, K2K Replicators, External Apps, App Migrations
IAM: Users, Service Account, Roles and Groups.
For a full guide to navigation and daily workflows, use the Lenses User Guide.
Open a demo environment or add your own
Lenses has two main components:
HQ manages users, environments, and workflows
Agent runs near Kafka and connects HQ to your services
Community Edition supports up to two Kafka environments.
If the Docker quick start already created a demo environment, open it from the explorer. Then continue to the next step.
If you do not have an environment yet, create one now.
Create a new environment
Before you start, have these ready:
Kafka bootstrap servers
Authentication details
Schema Registry URL, if used
Kafka Connect URL, if used
You can create a new environment in two ways;
From the environment listing page
From the navigation tree action buttons
From the landing page.
Enter an environment name.
You can also add:
a short description
a domain
an environment tier
Then click Create environment.
Lenses then opens the Agent deployment screen. Copy the generated command for Docker or Helm. Run it where the Agent will be deployed.
Agent startup can take up to a minute.
The agent key is only shown once. Note it down. If you forget you can regenerate the agent key from the environment context menu.
When the Agent is ready, continue to configuration.
Define connectivity for Kafka, Schema Registry, and Kafka Connect. The YAML preview updates as you edit the form.
After the Agent starts, download the generated provisioning.yaml. Keep it for future changes or automation.
Add the required values. Then click Test.
Testing shows what will be added, changed, or removed before you apply it.
If validation succeeds, Lenses shows a confirmation.
Click Apply to Agent.
You should now see the environment as connected.
For a full deployment flow against your own infrastructure, see Connecting Lenses to your Kafka environment.
Explore your environment
Once the agent is up and connect, it will start connecting to your Kafka broker and other services. It may take a minute for the agent to index the topics and schemas.
Once up, you can explore topics, apps from the left side bar and navigation panels.
The search on the left allows your to search across all resources, results are actionable, e.g. query data
Next steps
You now have a working Community Edition setup and a connected environment.
Next, you can:
learn the product in more depth in the Lenses User Guide
connect another Kafka environment
refine the Agent configuration
explore more deployment options in Connecting Lenses to your Kafka environment
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