Navigating & Discovering Lenses

Learn how to navigate Lenses, find resources, and work with tabs.

Use Lenses to move through your Kafka estate, find resources quickly, and keep key tabs open while you work.

Understand the main layout

The interface has four main areas:

1. Header bar — always visible at the top

2. Left navigation — the main icon-based navigation

3. Navigation tree — the panel that opens for the selected area

4. Tabs — the main area where tabs open

Tabs stay open when you switch between areas in the left navigation.

Use the header bar

The header bar gives you fast access to top-level views and quick entry points.

Home

Home is the launch pad for quick actions. It appears when no other tabs are open. You can reopen it from the top ribbon.

Environments

Use Environments to see all registered environments and their status.

All Topics

Use All Topics to list and search topics across every environment.

Left navigation

The left navigation opens the main resource areas in Lenses. Select an icon to open its navigation tree, browse resources, and open views in tabs.

Search

Use Search to find topics, schemas, applications, and IAM entities across all environments.

Open a result to inspect it in the workspace. Use the context menu for follow-up actions.

Environments and topics

Open Environments when you want to browse a specific Kafka environment. Expand an environment to:

1. list topics and schemas

2. manage environment configuration

3. access ACLs, quotas, alerts, auditing, and data or topic policies

For more on topic and schema discovery, see Discovering Topics & Schemas.

Apps

Open Apps to work with application-level features:

1. Kafka-to-Kafka replication between environments

2. application migration for consumer group mapping

3. SQL processing for continuous transformations

4. Kafka connectors for data integration

5. external apps that you register in Lenses

IAM

Open IAM to manage access and identity:

1. Users

2. Service accounts

3. Roles

4. Groups

Navigation tree

Each left navigation area opens a tree focused on that resource type. For example, Apps opens a tree of application types.

From the tree, you can:

1. expand and browse the tree

2. favourite resources

3. create new entities

4. list entities

Actions such as Create and List open in the workspace as tabs.

The top of the tree also includes actions such as search, refresh, and create. Available actions depend on the active area.

Favourites

Mark any entity as a favourite with the star icon. Favourites then appear in the left navigation and in quick actions where supported.

Tabs

The workspace is where you inspect resources and perform actions. Open items from the navigation tree or from context menus.

You can:

1. split a tab to create side-by-side views

2. drag and drop tabs to reorder them

3. move tabs between tab groups

Use the split icon to split the current tab.

Right-click a tab to open the tab context menu.

Breadcrumbs

Each tab shows breadcrumbs at the top. Use them to see where you are and move to related views.

Each breadcrumb segment opens a menu. Use it to move up or down the resource hierarchy and switch between related views such as topic profile, partitions, and configuration.

Tab context menus

Access contex menus with the elipsis (3 vertical dots)

Outer tabs have context menus for actions at the tab level. Resource tabs also expose actions for the selected entity.

For example, a topic tab can expose actions such as producing messages to that topic.

The tabs are available in the navigation tree, breadcrumbs and context menu (open in tab)

All grids also have context menus per row.

Pin tabs

Pin tabs to keep them open. You can pin a tab in three ways:

1. The pin icon in the tab label

2. Double-click the tab label

3. Ctrl / Cmd + S

The default behaviour of opening tabs from the navigation tree is to replace the current in focus tab

Legacy UX

Use the legacy UX if you prefer the older navigation model or need to follow an older workflow.

You can open it from context menus in the navigation tree and from supported resource tabs in the workspace.

Use the open-in-tab icon to jump to the legacy UX where it is available for that resource.