Kafdrop install and Monitor

There are many monitoring trools available for Kafka brokers. Ive collectiect Various monitoring options:

• Factor House Kpow
• Datadog
• Logit.io
• Kafka Lag Exporter
• Confluent
• CMAK (Cluster Manager for Apache Kafka)
• Kafdrop
• Offset Explorer
  

 Let's explore the kafdrop monitoring

Prerequisites:

To run the Kafdrop monitoring tool Ensure Java installed by checking

java -version

If you don't find java on your Ubuntu run the following :

sudo apt update
sudo apt install openjdk-21-jdk -y

for other Linux distributions you need to use right package manger to install JDK.

Download Kafdrop jar file from github:

sudo mkdir kafka-monitor
cd  kafka-monitor
curl -L -o kafdrop.jar https://github.com/obsidiandynamics/kafdrop/releases/download/4.1.0/kafdrop-4.1.0.jar

The curl command ensures that Kafdrop may have any release version but the jar file renamed as `kafdrop.jar`.

Now all set to go and run the Kafdrop jar file with the --kafka.brokerConnect option where you can give single Kafka broker details or Kafka cluster details as mentioned here:

java -jar kafdrop.jar \
--kafka.brokerConnect=kafka-broker1-host:port,kafka-broker2-host:port
 

If you don't specified anything, kafka.brokerConnect defaults to localhost:9092

Accessing Kafdrop UI

As Kafdrop uses 9000 as default port, So we can open a fresh browser and access the Kafdrop with localhost:9000 or from online terminals there will be Ports opened by providing custom port as '9000'. If you want to override the port and also get to know about the Kafka cluster details from a properties file then create a file named as 'application.properties' with the content as:

  server.port=9090
  kafka.brokerConnect=kafka-broker1-host:port,kafka-broker2-host:port
  

when you have application.properties file in the same path where kafdrop.jar presents then they all picked automatically so the command would be `java -jar kafddrop.jar`. *+*