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I am new to kafka. We want to monitor and manage kafka topics. We tried different open source monitoring tools like
kafka-monitor
kafka-manager
Both tools are good. But we are unable to make a decision which should be included in our deployment stack. Which one is better and why, and in which scenario?
'kafka manager' from yahoo looks the older one and 'kafka monitor' from LinkedIn is newer one
Kafka Monitor-
Lenses
Lenses (ex Landoop) enhances Kafka with User Interface, streaming SQL engine and cluster monitoring. It enables faster monitoring of Kafka data pipelines.
They provide a free all-in-one docker (Lenses Box) which can serve a single broker for up to 25M messages. Note that this is recommended for development environments.
Cloudera SMM
Streams Messaging Manager is the solution for monitoring and managing clusters running Cloudera or Hortonworks kafka. It also comes with replication capability.
Confluent
Another option is Confluent Enterprise which is a Kafka distribution for production environments. It also includes Control Centre, which is a management system for Apache Kafka that enables cluster monitoring and management from a User Interface.
Yahoo CMAK (Cluster Manager for Apache Kafka, previously known as Kafka Manager)
Kafka Manager or CMAK is a tool for monitoring Kafka offering less functionality compared to the aforementioned tools.
KafDrop
KafDrop is a UI for monitoring Apache Kafka clusters. The tool displays information such as brokers, topics, partitions, and even lets you view messages. It is a lightweight application that runs on Spring Boot and requires very little configuration.
LinkedIn Burrow
Burrow is a monitoring companion for Apache Kafka that provides consumer lag checking as a service without the need for specifying thresholds. It monitors committed offsets for all consumers and calculates the status of those consumers on demand. An HTTP endpoint is provided to request status on demand, as well as provide other Kafka cluster information. There are also configurable notifiers that can send status out via email or HTTP calls to another service.
Kafka Tool
Kafka Tool is a GUI application for managing and using Apache Kafka clusters. It provides an intuitive UI that allows one to quickly view objects within a Kafka cluster as well as the messages stored in the topics of the cluster. It contains features geared towards both developers and administrators.
If you cannot afford licenses, then go for Yahoo Kafka Manager, LinkedIn Burrow or KafDrop. Confluent's and Landoop's products are the best out there, but unfortunately, they require licensing.
For more details, you can refer to my blog post Overview of UI Monitoring tools for Apache Kafka Clusters.
If you want to pay for licensing and Kafka cluster support, then you can use Confluent Control Center
Alternatively, the free route would be to use JMX exporters from Datadog and/or Prometheus/Influxdb (with Grafana dashboards) to see overall system health checks (CPU, network, memory, etc)... Much more information than what you get only by monitoring Kafka processes with Kafka tools
At my company, we used the Yahoo product, we investigated the LinkedIn product, and several others mentioned. My company ultimately chose to use Prometheus+Grafana. Everyone loves it and I'd highly recommend it.
There are two big advantages to Prometheus+Grafana. The first is it does full featured Kafka metrics ingestion+visualization+alerting but it's not limited to Kafka. While our initial needs were just to monitor Kafka, we also wanted metrics on HTTP servers+traffic, server utilization (cpu/ram/disk), and custom application level metrics. Prometheus handles all of the above. Secondly, Prometheus + Grafana are very high quality, well designed, and easy to use. A lot of other products in this space are old and complicated to work with. Prometheus + Grafana are both excellent to work with, they are very customizable, polished, and easy to use. Grafana has a very flashy + functional JavaScript interface that lets you make exactly the customized dashboards that you want. Prometheus has a very polished metric collection engine, storage engine, query language, and alerting system. Something like Yahoo Kafka Manager has much more limited functionality in all of these categories.
If you want to try Prometheus, you need to do two things:
1) install+configure the JMX->Prometheus exporter on your Kafka brokers:
https://github.com/prometheus/jmx_exporter
2) Setup a Prometheus server to collect metrics + and setup a Grafana dashboard to display the graphs that you want.
I'd also say that this is just for monitoring+dashboards+alerting. For management functions, you still need other tools.
The kafka-monitor is (despite the name) a load generation and reporting tool. Yahoo's kafka-manager is an overall monitoring tool.
Related
I'm new to Kafka. During study to kafka, I think monitoring consumer's lag is needed. When I search from google and docs, I found few ways.
Kafka - Prometheus - graphana
kafka - burrow - someDB - graphana
kafka - burrow_stat?(I can't understand what it is..)
kafka - datadog
what I want to ask is
document says that burrow is for monitoring, can I visualize like graph(dashboard)?
without other tools like graphana or kibana or datadog??
I just trying to get less pipeline steps. What should be the simple way to visualize consumer's lag?
If you are doing the setup in an organisation, datadog or prometheus is probably the way to go. You can capture other Kafka related metrics as well. These agents also have integrations with many other tools beside Kafka and will be a good common choice for monitoring.
If you are just doing it for personal POC type of a project and you just want to view the lag, I find CMAK very useful (https://github.com/yahoo/CMAK). This does not have historical data, but provides a good current visual state of Kafka cluster including lag.
For cluster wide metrics you can use kafka_exporter (https://github.com/danielqsj/kafka_exporter) which exposes some very useful cluster metrics(including consumer lag) and is easy to integrate with prometheus and visualize using grafana.
Burrow is extremely effective and specialised in monitoring consumer lag.Burrow is good at caliberating consumer offset and more importantly validate if the lag is malicious or not. It has integrations with pagerduty so that the alerts are pushed to the necessary parties.
https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Community-Articles/Monitoring-Kafka-with-Burrow-Part-1/ta-p/245987
What burrow has:
Non-threshold based lag monitoring algorithm capable to evaluate potential slow downs.
Integration with pagerduty
Exporters for prometheus, AppD etc for historical metrics
Pluggable UI
If you are looking for quick solution you can deploy burrow followed by the burrow front end https://github.com/GeneralMills/BurrowUI
We have some applications which want to communicate with Kafka using REST API calls to both consume and produce messages. If we do not want to use Confluent REST Proxy, what are the options ?
One possible alternative is the Strimzi Kafka Bridge (https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-bridge).
It's part of the broader Strimzi project about running Kafka on Kubernetes but work even running as standalone (when your Kafka cluster is on bare metal).
Of course it's open source and Apache 2.0 licensed.
the reason [not to use it] is monetary
You can use the Confluent REST Proxy with no software/licensing costs.
We are thinking of not buying any additional hardware for this new request and use existing configuration to meet the requirement.I am mostly interested to know if consumer/producer can be created to meet this requirement
You don't need extra hardware.
Pick an existing server with at least 2GB available of memory, and run kafka-rest-start and see how well it works
if we can create Rest-API calls which will be used by other applications to consume data from Kafka and push data to Kafka
That's the main purpose of REST Proxy, yes.
We are currently using HDF (Hortonworks Dataflow) 3.3.1 which bundles Kafka 2.0.0. Problem is with running multiple connectors with different configuration(Kerberos principals) on same KafkaConnect Cluster.
As part of this Kafka version, all connectors are supposed to use same consumer/producer properties which have been set in worker configuration with consumer.* or producer.* prefix. But as I stated, we have multiple users (apps) running their own connectors and we can't use a single Kerberos principal to allow read on all topics.
So just wanted to check with experts if there is any way this security limitation can be over come. The option I can think of is - run a different Kafka-Connect cluster for each Kafka User (different principals) but what implications it could have if we run many KafkaConnect Clusters on same nodes ? Will it cause any impacts in term of resources (Java heap etc.) or this is the only way (standard procedure) to handle this.
PS: In later releases (2.3+) this problem is fixed via KAFKA-8265 and these settings can be overwritten but even if we try upgrading to latest HDF we will only get Kafka 2.1 which will not solve this issue.
Thanks for your help !!
I think upgrading is your best option to get the linked feature. As I commented, you can go get latest kafka versions on your own... Hortonworks/Cloudera doesn't offer support for Connect anyway. They'd rather you use Spark/Flink/NiFi (I think Storm is no longer around?)
what implications it could have if we run many KafkaConnect Clusters on same nodes ? Will it cause any impacts in term of resources (Java heap etc.)
Heap is the main one (for batching, sink connectors). Network and CPU load could also come into account, depending on rate of messages.
As long as the advertised ports for each cluster process aren't colliding, you should be able to use the same group ids and internal topics, though
I am new to Zookeper and am wondering, I understand Zookeper can be used as configuration storage, and considering that what if I have one client of Zookeeper should not have access to certain configurations? How do I restrict that access?
Scenario: I want to use it as a configuration service, from where my application retrieves its configurations, database endpoint lists etc. Can I do that with Zookeper ? If I can how do I restrict access, so one application doesn't access configurations from another?
ZooKeeper is a distributed co-ordination service to manage large set of hosts. Co-ordinating and managing a service in a distributed environment is a complicated process. ZooKeeper solves this issue with its simple architecture and API. ZooKeeper allows developers to focus on core application logic without worrying about the distributed nature of the application.
The ZooKeeper framework was originally built at “Yahoo!” for accessing their applications in an easy and robust manner. Later, Apache ZooKeeper became a standard for organized service used by Hadoop, HBase, and other distributed frameworks. For example, Apache HBase uses ZooKeeper to track the status of distributed data.
It's not a key-value storage
I'm trying to mirror Kafka real-time data from one server to another server.
Found a tool called 'Mirror Maker' at Apache website.
[Apache Kafka Mirror Maker][1]
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=27846330#Kafkamirroring(MirrorMaker)-Howtosetupamirror
But the description is too simple, without configuration detail of consumer.config & producer.config files.
How to deploy this tool with correct config files for mirroring data between two Kafka servers for:
Real-time topics transfer
fault-tolerant under unstable network
Any other possible way to achieve this is also very welcome.
Thanks.
Apache's Mirror Maker is a relatively simple tool, this is why all the documentation you read doesn't seem incredible informative. There isn't much information to give. All it does is consume data from cluster A and produce to cluster B. Mirror Maker does provide real-time topic transfer but as far as stability goes you may need to look to third party tools such as https://eng.uber.com/ureplicator/.