Categories: BigData

I recently discovered a free web-based management console for the Kafka message broker called Kafka Manager. Although I have only spent half-an-hour playing with it so far, it looks reasonable.

Releases are only provided in source form. As described on the home-page, the code can be compiled with

  ./sbt clean dist

This produces a zip-file which can then be unpacked, configured and started. Compilation on my laptop took about half an hour, mostly due to the need to download vast amounts of Scala infrastructure.

Then:

• unpack somewhere
• edit conf/application.conf to set the zookeeper address
• run sh bin/kafka-manager
• open a web-browser to localhost:9000
• select menu option “add cluster” and enter a url like “host:port/NAMESPACE” where host:port point to the zookeeper instance, and NAMESPACE is usually empty.

It is also helpful to set environment variable JMX_PORT on the Kafka message broker nodes. This allows Kafka Manager to obtain far more information about the message broker state. It is not necessary to explicitly configure the port-number within Kafka Manager - it appears to obtain this via the Kafka cluster itself.