Which JMX Metrics gives the health of a kafka cluster? - apache-kafka

I want to know whether Kafka broker is up or not? I have enabled JMX in Kafka but couldn't find any Mbean name that can provide me the status of Kafka. Any idea?

There are multiple things to check health of a cluster, both of which are individual Mbeans and will need to be aggregated over the entire cluster
Is there only one controller
Are there no out-of-sync replicas
You may also want to externally port check the brokers from the environments you want to produce and consume from

Related

What is the difference between Kafka Cluster and Kafka Broker?

Has Kafka cluster and Kafka broker the same meaning?
I know cluster has multiple brokers (Is this wrong?).
But when I write code to produce messages, I find awkward option.
props.put("bootstrap.servers", "kafka001:9092, kafka002:9092, kafka003:9092");
Is this broker address or cluster address? If this is broker address, I think it is not good because we have to modify above address when brokers count changes.
(But it seems like broker address..)
Additionally, I saw in MSK in amazon, we can add broker to each AZ.
It means, we cannot have many broker. (Three or four at most?)
And they guided we should write this broker addresses to bootstrap.serveroption as a,` seperated list.
Why they don't guide us to use clusters address or ARN?
A Kafka cluster is a group of Kafka brokers.
When using the Producer API it is not required to mention all brokers within the cluster in the bootstrap.servers properties. The Producer configuration documentation on bootstrap.servers gives the full details:
A list of host/port pairs to use for establishing the initial connection to the Kafka cluster. The client will make use of all servers irrespective of which servers are specified here for bootstrapping—this list only impacts the initial hosts used to discover the full set of servers. This list should be in the form host1:port1,host2:port2,.... Since these servers are just used for the initial connection to discover the full cluster membership (which may change dynamically), this list need not contain the full set of servers (you may want more than one, though, in case a server is down).
All brokers within a cluster share meta information of other brokers in the same cluster. Therefore, it is sufficient to mention even only one broker in the bootstrap-servers properties. However, you should still mention more than one in case of the one broker being not available for whatever reason.

Is it possible to enable or disable the specific JMX Metrics to monitor for a Kafka cluster using Jconsole

On my Kafka cluster,I am able to view and monitor certain Mbean JMX metrics like RequestsPerSec etc. However I only see a very few of the metrics mentioned in the Apache Kafka documentation on my JConsole. Is there a way to enable others. Especially is there a way to enable a few specific ones explicitly.
Kafka has different metric sets on particular components, and some versions of Kafka have more/less metrics than others
The brokers, producers and consumers each have different JMX metrics
There's no way to disable/enable MBeans

Gathering `kafka.producer` metrics using JMX

I have a Kakfa broker running, which I am monitoring with JMX.
This broker is a docker container running as a process started with kafka-server-start.sh JMX port 9999 is exposed as and used as an environment variables.
When I connect to the JMX port and try to list all the domains, I get the following;
kafka
kafka.cluster
kafka.controller
kafka.coordinator.group
kafka.coordinator.transaction
kafka.log
kafka.network
kafka.server
kafka.utils
I dont see kafka.producer which is understandable because the producer for this Kafka broker are N numbers of different applications, but at this point I am confused.
How do I get the kafka.producer metrics as well.
Do I have to expose the kafka.producer metrics in each of N application that is acting as producer OR is there some configuration that start gathering kafka.producer metrics on the broker only.
What is the correct way of doing this. Please help.
Yes you are correct , to capture the producer JMX metrics , you need to enable JMX in all the processes which are running the kafka producer instance.
It might be helpful to rephrase producing as writing over an unreliable network in this context.
From this perspective, the most reasonable place to measure writing characteristics seems to be the client itself (i.e. in each "application" as you call it).
If messages between the producer and the broker are lost, you can still send stats to a local "metric store" for example (e.g. you could see a "spike" in record-retry-rate or some other relevant metric).
Additionally, pairing Kafka producer metrics with additional, local metrics might be extremely useful (JVM stats, detailed business metrics and so on). Keep in mind, that the client will almost definitely run on a different machine in a production environment, and might be affected by different factors, than the broker itself.
If you intend to monitor your client application (which will most likely happen anyway), then I'd simply do it there (i.e. the standard way).

How many bootstrap servers to provide for large Kafka cluster

I have a use case where my Kafka cluster will have 1000 brokers and I am writing Kafka client.
In order to write client, i need to provide brokers list.
Question is, what are the recommended guidelines to provide brokers list in client?
Is there any proxy like service available in kafka which we can give to client?
- that proxy will know all the brokers in cluster and connect client to appropriate broker.
- like in redis world, we have twemproxy (nutcracker)
- confluent-rest-api can act as proxy?
Is it recommended to provide any specific number of brokers in client, for example provide list of 3 brokers even though cluster has 1000 nodes?
- what if provided brokers gets crashed?
- what if provided brokers restarts and there location/ip changes?
The list of broker URL you pass to the client are only to bootstrap the client. Thus, the client will automatically learn about all other available brokers automatically, and also connect to the correct brokers it need to "talk to".
Thus, if the client is already running, the those brokers go down, the client will not even notice. Only if all those brokers are down at the same time, and you startup the client, the client will "hang" as it cannot connect to the cluster and eventually time out.
It's recommended to provide at least 3 broker URLs to "survive" the outage of 2 brokers. But you can also provide more if you need a higher level of resilience.

Why do we need to add all zookeeper nodes in Kafka Consumer Configuration

Looks like we need to add the ip addresses of all zookeeper nodes in the property "zookeeper.connect" for configuring a consumer.
Now my understanding says the zookeeper cluster has a leader which is managed in a fail-safe way.
So, why cant we just provide a bootstrap list for zookeeper nodes like its done in Producer configuration(while providing bootstrap broker list) & they should provide metadata about the entire zookeeper cluster?
You can specify a subset of the nodes. The nodes in that list are only used to get an initial connection to the cluster of nodes and the client goes through the list until a connection is made. Usually the first node is up and available so the client doesn't have to go too far into the list. So you only need to add extra nodes to the list depending on how pessimistic you are.