DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Please enter at least three characters to search
Refcards Trend Reports
Events Video Library
Refcards
Trend Reports

Events

View Events Video Library

Zones

Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks

Last call! Secure your stack and shape the future! Help dev teams across the globe navigate their software supply chain security challenges.

Modernize your data layer. Learn how to design cloud-native database architectures to meet the evolving demands of AI and GenAI workloads.

Releasing software shouldn't be stressful or risky. Learn how to leverage progressive delivery techniques to ensure safer deployments.

Avoid machine learning mistakes and boost model performance! Discover key ML patterns, anti-patterns, data strategies, and more.

Related

  • Using KRaft Kafka for Development and Kubernetes Deployment
  • Setting Up Local Kafka Container for Spring Boot Application
  • Reactive Kafka With Streaming in Spring Boot
  • KubeMQ: A Modern Alternative to Kafka

Trending

  • Top Book Picks for Site Reliability Engineers
  • Event-Driven Architectures: Designing Scalable and Resilient Cloud Solutions
  • Unlocking AI Coding Assistants Part 4: Generate Spring Boot Application
  • Unlocking the Benefits of a Private API in AWS API Gateway
  1. DZone
  2. Coding
  3. Tools
  4. Kafka Administration and Monitoring UI Tools

Kafka Administration and Monitoring UI Tools

By 
Guy Shilo user avatar
Guy Shilo
·
Nov. 28, 19 · Opinion
Likes (9)
Comment
Save
Tweet
Share
129.6K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

franz-kafka-statue

Kafka itself comes with command line tools that can perform all necessary administrative tasks. But, those tools aren’t very convenient because they are not integrated into one tool, and you need to run a different tool for different tasks. Moreover, it is getting difficult to work with them when your clusters grow large, or when you have several clusters.

So, today, we will cover some GUI alternatives.

You may also like: A Kafka Tutorial for Everyone, no Matter Your Stage in Development.

Kafka Tool

The first is Kafka Tool. It is a Windows program that can connect to a Kafka cluster and do all basic tasks. It can list brokers, topics, or consumers and their properties. It allows you to create new topics or update existing ones, and you can even look at the messages in a topic or partition.

Although it is very useful, its UI seems somewhat old, and it lacks some monitoring features, such as topic lag. Also, it is not free for commercial use. So, you can't really use it at work unless you pay for it. (Technically you can, but this would violate the licensing terms and put you and your employer at risk.)

Kafka Tool

Kafka Tool

Kafka Manager

Kafka Manager is a web-based management system for Kafka developed at Yahoo. It is capable of administrating multiple clusters; it can show statistics on individual brokers or topics, such as messages per second, lag, and etc. But, it's more of an administrative tool. Unfortunately, you can't use it to browse messages.

It also requires access to ZooKeeper nodes, so you might not be able to use it in some production environments, where ZooKeeper nodes are typically firewalled.

Here are the steps to install it:

First, download the zip distribution from the link above and unzip it.

Edit application.conf and change kafka-manager.zkhosts to one or more of your ZooKeeper hosts, for example kafka-manager.zkhosts="cloudera2:2181".

Now you should build Kafka Manager. It uses the play framework, but it is installed and configured automatically (unlike Kafka web console that is discussed later). In the directory where you unzipped it, run:

./sbt clean dist


This can take a long time to complete (about 30 minutes on the first build, as it has to download a bunch of dependencies).

This will create a distribution file ./target/universal/kafka-manager-x.x.x.x.zip

Replace x.x.x.x with the version number.

Unzip it to a directory of your choice.

After it’s done starting, you can access it with your browser at port 9000. (This is the default, but you can change it by adding -Dhttp.port= startup parameter.)

Kafka Manager

Kafka Manager

Kafdrop

Kafdrop is a web UI for viewing Kafka topics and browsing consumer groups. The tool displays information, such as brokers, topics, partitions, consumers, and lets you view messages. Kafdrop seems modern and very impressive, and its capabilities are very similar to those of Kafka Manager, but with more focus on letting you view the contents of the brokers. Its features include:

  • View Kafka brokers — Topic and partition assignments and controller status.
  • View topics — Partition count, replication status, and custom configuration.
  • Browse messages — JSON, plain text, and Avro encoding.
  • View consumer groups — Per-partition parked offsets, combined, and per-partition lag.
  • Create new topics
  • View ACLs

To get started, just use Docker:

docker run -it -p 9000:9000 \
    -e KAFKA_BROKERCONNECT=<host:port,host:port> \
    obsidiandynamics/kafdrop


When it starts, open your browser to localhost:9000:

Kafdrop

Kafdrop

Burrow

Another tool worth mentioning is Burrow from LinkedIn. We will not cover it in detail this time because it does not fall into the same category as the previous tools mentioned here. It does not have a graphical user interface, and it does not have any cluster management capabilities.

Its strength is in its ability to monitor consumer groups for lags and general health in a simple way. It can also automatically notify an administrator by email or HTTP about any problems. I covered it in more detail in this post: Monitoring Kafka consumer lag with Burrow.


Further Reading

  • Kafka Monitoring With Burrow.
kafka Docker (software)

Published at DZone with permission of Guy Shilo. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Related

  • Using KRaft Kafka for Development and Kubernetes Deployment
  • Setting Up Local Kafka Container for Spring Boot Application
  • Reactive Kafka With Streaming in Spring Boot
  • KubeMQ: A Modern Alternative to Kafka

Partner Resources

×

Comments
Oops! Something Went Wrong

The likes didn't load as expected. Please refresh the page and try again.

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Support and feedback
  • Community research
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Core Program
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 3343 Perimeter Hill Drive
  • Suite 100
  • Nashville, TN 37211
  • support@dzone.com

Let's be friends:

Likes
There are no likes...yet! 👀
Be the first to like this post!
It looks like you're not logged in.
Sign in to see who liked this post!