Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX • Hacker News Board

Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX

#1

Post by weeco » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 12:04 PM UTC

Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX
github.com

Re: Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX

#2

Post by jasonvorhe » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

This looks dope, I'll check it out after my vacation for our Kafka clusters. I haven't yet found a decent web interface for Kafka. For cluster overview there's cruise-control but apart from that it all feels too messy and the UX is often more of an afterthought. Thanks for doing this. I hope your enterprise features provide you with sufficient revenue to keep this going. If not, maybe offer a donation button somewhere?

Re: Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX

#3

Post by weeco » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

jasonvorhe wrote: post #2

This looks dope, I'll check it out after my vacation for our Kafka clusters. I haven't yet found a decent web interface for Kafka. For cluster overview there's cruise-control but apart from that it all feels too messy and the UX is often more of an afterthought. Thanks for doing this. I hope your enterprise features provide you with sufficient revenue to keep this going. If not, maybe offer a donation button somewher…

We don't have any expectations or force to make money with Kowl. Besides that we already use Kowl at our company where engineers use it with joy in their daily business. We don't only get valuable feedback from colleagues who use Kowl, but our employer does also sponsor our efforts with working time. If it ultimately turns out to be not profitable at all we will simply open source everything I guess.

Re: Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX

#4

Post by klden007 » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

I also can recommend https://github.com/tchiotludo/akhq for basic Kafka management

Re: Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX

#5

Post by mwaitjmp » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

This looks great. Does it support avro via the schema registry?

Re: Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX

#6

Post by fourseventy » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

I was looking for something like this about a year ago but no open source solution existed. Thank you!

Re: Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX

#7

Post by bgorman » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

mwaitjmp wrote: post #5

This looks great. Does it support avro via the schema registry?

It would be great to have this info on the readme

Re: Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX

#8

Post by tutfbhuf » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

Our company uses https://github.com/obsidiandynamics/kafdrop it's FOSS. It can also handle AVRO and PROTOBUF messages.

Re: Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX

#9

Post by weeco » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

bgorman wrote: post #7

mwaitjmp wrote: post #5

This looks great. Does it support avro via the schema registry?

It would be great to have this info on the readme

Agreed, added!

Re: Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX

#10

Post by weeco » Sun, Aug 09, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

mwaitjmp wrote: post #5

This looks great. Does it support avro via the schema registry?

No it doesn't support avro yet, but this is being worked on and we think this could be added in 1.2 already! I added a note about the supported message formats in the readme.