How to send logs from Google Stackdriver to Kafka - apache-kafka

Question

I see many docs and posts about how to send logs to Stackdriver but almost no information about how to do the opposite - send logs from the Stackdriver to Kafka.
In my case, our Ops want to collect the logs from our web servers using Google's stackdriver agents and pushing them to stackdriver ... However, for my stream processing needs I want to get the logs into Kafka to use it's unparalleled abilities to retain and reprocess data by any number of consumers, something that I cannot do with PubSub.
So, what are the options for doing this? I only saw a couple of possible avenues - neither sounds too good:
based on this post: (https://powerspace.tech/how-to-stream-data-from-google-pubsub-to-kafka-with-kafka-connect-dbef1c340a76) push data into PubSub first, and then read from it using either Kafka connector or write my own Kafka consumer. I hate the thought of adding yet another hop (serialize/deserialize/ack/etc.) between the source of data and Kafka ....
I noticed a brief mentioning in passing on adding a plugin to Google's version of Fluentd (which is what stackdriver log collection agent is based on) here: https://powerspace.tech/how-to-stream-data-from-google-pubsub-to-kafka-with-kafka-connect-dbef1c340a76 . Not many details - so hard to tell how involved this approach is ...
Any other options?
Thank you!

Answer 1

Enter in to the Kafka console and add certain elements in the console. Once you have added the elements in the Kafka console you need to check if these elements are reflected successfully in the cloud shell. For this you will run the command > $ gcloud pubsub subscriptions pull from-kafka — auto-ack — limit=10 < . Once you run this command it will take some time to sync with the Kafka console. You will get the results after running this command a couple of times.
You will run the commands in the Cloud Shell and see the output in the Kafka VM SSH.
***Image1
Now you will be verifying the exact opposite procedure where in you will be running the command in the Kafka VM and seeing the output in the Cloud Shell. It will take some time for the output to be reflected and you may have to run the command > $ gcloud pubsub subscriptions pull from-kafka — auto-ack — limit=10 < a couple of times to see the output. Your output will look like this
*** image2

Answer 2

The Kafka plugin is deprecated. For more information, refer to https://cloud.google.com/stackdriver/docs/deprecations
Note: This functionality is only available for agents running on Linux. It is not available on Windows.
Kafka is monitored via JMX. Monitoring supports monitoring Kafka version 0.8.2 and higher.
On your VM instance, download kafka-082.conf from the GitHub configuration repository and place it in the directory /etc/stackdriver/collectd.d/:
(cd /etc/stackdriver/collectd.d/ && sudo curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Stackdriver/stackdriver-agent-service-configs/master/etc/collectd.d/kafka-082.conf)
The downloaded plugin configuration file assumes that your Kafka server is configured to accept JMX connections on port 9999. If you have configured Kafka with a different JMX port, as root, edit the file and follow the instructions to change the JMX port settings.
After adding the configuration file, restart the Monitoring agent by running the following command:
sudo service stackdriver-agent restart
What is monitored:
https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/metrics_agent#agent-kafka