Kafka is not primarily designed as a monitoring tool, but rather as a distributed streaming platform. It is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. However, Kafka does provide some basic monitoring capabilities that can help with understanding the health and performance of Kafka clusters.
One of the built-in monitoring features of Kafka is the ability to expose metrics through JMX (Java Management Extensions). JMX is a Java technology that provides a standard way of managing and monitoring resources, such as applications and services, running on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Kafka exposes various metrics related to topics, partitions, producers, consumers, and broker performance. These JMX metrics can be collected and analyzed using external monitoring tools.
Cloudera Manager, which is a comprehensive management and monitoring solution for Apache Kafka and other Cloudera components, also provides monitoring capabilities for Kafka. Cloudera Manager can collect and display Kafka metrics, including throughput, latency, and resource utilization, in a centralized dashboard. It can also send alerts based on predefined thresholds to notify administrators of any issues or anomalies.
However, compared to dedicated Kafka monitoring tools like Confluent Control Center, Lenses, or Datadog, the monitoring features provided by Kafka and Cloudera Manager are relatively basic. These dedicated tools offer more advanced features and visualizations, such as real-time monitoring, fine-grained control over metrics collection, and detailed insights into Kafka internals.
For example, Confluent Control Center provides a powerful web-based interface for monitoring and managing Kafka clusters. It offers features like topic and consumer group monitoring, lag monitoring, message search, and stream processing visualizations. Lenses is another popular tool that provides advanced monitoring and management capabilities for Kafka, including real-time streaming SQL queries, data lineage, and data mirroring. Datadog is a general-purpose monitoring platform that supports Kafka monitoring through its integration with the Kafka JMX metrics.
While Kafka does provide some basic monitoring capabilities through JMX metrics and Cloudera Manager, it is not as feature-rich as dedicated Kafka monitoring tools like Confluent Control Center, Lenses, or Datadog. These tools offer more advanced monitoring features and visualizations, making them a better choice for organizations that require comprehensive monitoring and management of their Kafka clusters. However, for companies already using Cloudera Manager for managing their Cloudera ecosystem, Kafka monitoring within Cloudera Manager can be a convenient option to have monitoring mechanisms under the same platform.