What is Kafka Tool?

What is Kafka Tool?

Many open-source and for-profit graphical solutions with a range of administration and monitoring functions have entered the market in response to the rising demand for Kafka Cluster monitoring and management.

Kafka Tool is a graphical user interface (GUI) program for controlling and using Apache Kafka clusters. It has an easy-to-use interface that allows you to rapidly inspect objects inside a Kafka cluster as well as messages stored in the cluster's topics. It has features for both developers and administrators.

Key Features Include the Following

• Get an overview of your Kafka clusters, including their brokers, topics, and consumers, on a single screen.
• Recognize the contents of messages in your partitions and add new messages.
• Recognize offsets of consumers, including Apache Storm Kafka spout consumers
• Display JSON, XML, and Avro messages in a pretty printed manner.
• Topics may be added and removed, and additional administrative capabilities are available.
• Save individual messages from your partitions to your hard disc.
• Create your plugins to display unique data formats.
• Offset Explorer is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

Top 3 Types of Kafka Tools

Under org.apache.kafka.tools.* the Kafka Tool is bundled. System tools and replication tools are two types of tools.

1. System Tools : Tools from the Kafka system are used for tasks like mirroring the cluster, presenting consumer groups, and moving brokers between versions. The run class script allows for the command-line execution of system tools.

   The following syntax can be used to execute the System Tools.

   Syntax:

   Below are some of the system tools :

• The Kafka Migration Tool is used to migrate the Kafka Broker from one version to another.

• Consumer Offset Checker: For the supplied collection of Topics and Consumer Groups, this tool may display Consumer Group, Topic, Partitions, Off-set, logSize, and Owner.

• Mirror Maker: Maintaining a replica of an existing Kafka cluster is possible thanks to the mirroring feature of Kafka. The MirrorMaker tool may be used to mirror a source Kafka cluster onto a target (mirror) Kafka cluster as shown in the following image. The tool consumes messages from the source cluster using a Kafka consumer, and then utilizes an embedded Kafka producer to republish those messages to the local (target) cluster.

2. Replication Software :

   These are essentially advanced design tools that are made available for their availability and durability.

   Some of the Replication Tools are:

   • Create Topic Tool: In addition to using Kafka's default replica assignment mechanism, this constructs a topic with a default replication factor and several partitions.
   • List Topic Tool: The information for a given list of topics is listed using the list topic tool. The remarkable part about this program is that it will query the Zookeeper to retrieve the Topics list first and then print the information about them if there is no subject currently present in the command line. There are numerous fields listed, including Subject Name, Partitions, Leader, Replicas, and others.
   • Add Partition Tool: This tool is used to add partitions to a topic that are necessary to address the subject's growing data volume. Nevertheless, we must define the partitions when we create the subject. This utility enables us to create manual replicas for the newly inserted partitions.

• Miscellaneous Tools :

  • Kafka-Topics Tool: This program is used to create, list, modify, and describe topics.

    The following syntax can be used to execute the System Tools.

    Example: Topic Creation

  • Kafka-Console-Consumer Tool: This program is capable of reading data from Kafka topics and writing it to standard output.

    Example:

  • Kafka-console-producer Tool: This tool can send data from Standard Output to a Kafka Topic.

    Example:

  • Kafka-consumer-groups Tool: This tool is useful for listing all consumer groups, describing a consumer group, deleting consumer group information, and resetting consumer group offsets. This tool is primarily used to describe consumer groups and troubleshoot any consumer offset difficulties.

    Example: Viewing Offsets on an unsecured cluster:

Kafka Architecture

• Producers and consumers are considered external actors for our purposes. Kafka's Zookeeper service and Kafka cluster are part of the internal ecosystem.
• Zookeeper is a solution for managing and coordinating Kafka brokers that use distributed configuration and synchronization. When a broker is added to or fails in the Kafka system, Zookeeper alerts producers and consumers.
• Load balancing is the responsibility of brokers inside a Kafka cluster.
• Zookeeper initializes several Kafka brokers inside the Kafka cluster to meet the increasing demand.

• Broker :

  • The Topic's Message Storage is handled by the Broker, sometimes referred to as the Kafka Server. To ensure load balance, each Kafka Cluster has many Kafka Brokers. Nevertheless, as they are stateless, ZooKeeper is utilized to preserve the Kafka Clusters state.
  • While building a Kafka system, it is typically a good approach to take Topic replication into account. Because of this, if one Broker goes down, copies of that Broker's Topics from another Broker can help.

• Producer:

  • A Producer sends or publishes data/messages to the topic inside a Kafka cluster. To store a huge amount of data, many Kafka Producers inside an application send data to Kafka Clusters.
  • It's vital to understand that messages are delivered by the Kafka Producer as rapidly as the Broker can process them. A Producer's addition to a Topic publishes the record to the Topic's Leader.
  • Every item of incoming data is stacked up on the cluster, and Kafka only makes a record visible to a Consumer when it has been committed.

• Zookeeper:

  • In a ZooKeeper, information about the Kafka clusters and the consumer clients is kept. The Brokers, Topics, and Partitions of the Kafka Clusters are managed and maintained by this node, which serves the role of a Master Management Node.
  • Brokers of Kafka Clusters are monitored by Zookeeper. It calculates the lifespan of the Brokers, as well as which Brokers have crashed and which Brokers have just joined the Kafka Clusters.

• Consumer:

  • Consumers can choose to start reading messages at a particular offset or any other offset point of their choosing.
  • In addition to maintaining track of the group's offset for each Partition, the Broker will distribute messages depending on which Consumers should read from which Partitions.
  • All consumers are required to indicate which offsets they have handled to maintain track of this.