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Apache Kafka has risen as a pivotal element in modern distributed systems, transforming data processing, storage, and distribution across diverse applications. Kafka, developed by Kafka, is an open-source distributed event streaming platform. It is designed to efficiently manage high volumes of real-time data, acting as a distributed messaging system. Kafka enables the publishing and subscribing to streams of records, similar to a message queue or enterprise messaging system, but with further capabilities and enhancements for handling large-scale data streams. It is often utilized for building real-time data pipelines, event-driven architectures, and streaming data processing applications.
Guaranteeing peak performance is critical for sustaining seamless operations in distributed systems. Given the vast scale of modern data ecosystems, effective monitoring becomes indispensable for Kafka to function optimally. To assist you with Kafka monitoring, organizations utilize Kafka monitoring tools. These tools significantly streamline the process of Kafka monitoring and help to conduct the process effectively.
However, there’s currently an extensive variety of Kafka monitoring tools available, all offering the same basic functionality but with some different features and capabilities. This can make it difficult to know which Kafka monitoring tool is most appropriate for your organization. So, to help you with this, in this article we will explain what Kafka monitoring is and list the top 8 Kafka monitoring tools.
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What is Kafka Monitoring?
Kafka monitoring can be defined as the practice of tracking and managing the health, performance, and utilization of Apache Kafka clusters. This typically involves tracking numerous metrics such as throughput, latency, partition lag, disk usage, and network activity. Kafka monitoring tools supply insights into the overall health and behavior of Kafka clusters, enabling administrators to highlight and diagnose issues, improve performance, and guarantee reliable operation. Monitoring Kafka clusters aids organizations in maintaining the stability and efficiency of their real-time data pipelines and streaming applications.
Factor House Kpow
The first tool in our list of Kafka monitoring tools is Factor House Kpow. Kpow is a JVM-based web application intended to simplify, secure, and enhance enterprise Kafka tooling. The tool covers the full surface area of Kafka, Schema, Connect, and ksqlDB without inventing new ideas or concepts. As well as this, multi-topic search with built-in JQ filtering enables your team to reduce the time to resolution of production issues.
Datadog
The next Kafka monitoring tool included in our list is Datadog, an observability solution for cloud-scale applications. Using Datadog, you have the ability to gather metrics, logs, and traces from your Kafka deployment. This enables you to visualize and set alerts on the performance of your entire Kafka stack. Datadog automatically gathers numerous key metrics and provides them in a pre-configured dashboard template.
Logit.io
Logit.io is a powerful and cost-effective observability platform with extensive features and monitoring capabilities. Utilizing Logit.io for Kafka monitoring is easy and can provide significant benefits to your team and organization. Simply, configure Metricbeat to collect and ship Apache Kafka service metrics and statistics. These metrics will then be available in the Logit.io dashboard for monitoring. This provides you with enhanced visibility into vital metrics enabling you to efficiently monitor Kafka with speed and accuracy.
Kafka Lag Exporter
The Kafka Lag Exporter simplifies the process of monitoring offset lag and estimating the latency (residence time) of your Apache Kafka consumer groups. The tool can operate anywhere, however it offers features to run easily on Kubernetes utilizing the Prometheus and Grafana monitoring stack. The tool is written in Scala and is actively maintained.
Confluent
Another Kafka monitoring tool included in the list is Confluent. The Confluent Project's commercial license includes the Confluent Control Center, serving as Apache Kafka's control framework. It facilitates user interface cluster monitoring and control. The Confluent Control Center provides visibility into the operations and data movement within Apache Kafka clusters.
CMAK (Cluster Manager for Apache Kafka)
CMAK, formerly known as Kafka Manager, is a simple tool for managing and monitoring Apache Kafka clusters. This Kafka monitoring tool supports a range of features including easy inspection of cluster state, the ability to generate partition assignments with the option to select brokers to use, the option to run preferred replica edition, and the ability to manage numerous clusters.
Kafdrop
Continuing with our list of Kafka monitoring tools, the next solution included is Kafdrop, an open-source web UI for viewing Kafka topics and browsing consumer groups. The tool displays a variety of information such as topics, partitions, brokers, and consumers. With Kafdrop you can view Kafka brokers, browse messages, create new topics, view topics ACLs and consumer groups, and it offers support for Azure Event Hub.
Offset Explorer
The final Kafka monitoring tool is Offset Explorer, previously Kafka tool, a GUI application for managing and using Apache Kafka clusters. The tool offers similar features and capabilities to those of Kafdrop and CMAK such as enabling you to quickly view all your Kafka clusters, view the contents of messages, and add and drop topics. In addition to this with the Offset Explorer, you can write your own plugins and view offsets of the consumers.
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