There are several alternatives posted here already, but after comparing several ones maybe a year ago I found Kowl very nice: Nice UI, backend written in Go (quick startup, low memory usage), viewing and filtering of messages, support for schema registry, comes with a Docker image, usable locally and Helm chart for Kubernetes.
Show HN: UI for Apache Kafka
31–40 of 60 posts
Re: Show HN: UI for Apache Kafka
#32A few pieces of feedback.
Positive:
- Multi-cluster support is a great feature! That's the main thing missing from Kowl, in my opinion
- The UI feels clean
- Message streaming feels smooth, and the search feature is a great addition. Also love the ability to see a message for a given partition/offset, and that JSON messages are nicely rendered as JSON!
- The CleanupPolicy logic doesn't handle "delete,compact" (I see bug number 829 addressed a slightly related issue, maybe that logic could be expanded [1])
- When viewing Cluster -> Topic -> Consumers, it seems like far more is being loaded than just consumer groups for that particular topic. It takes much longer to load than, e.g., Kowl does for pulling the same information
- Similar feedback for when clicking on an individual consumer group (example URL path: "/ui/clusters/dev/consumer-groups/my-group"). It takes a very long time to load
- If any permissions issues are encountered while loading the individual consumer group, the entire request fails. That wouldn't necessarily be an issue, but it is when you're loading all consumer groups, and not just the one requested
- I don't see any docs on how to access a topic that is secured with certificates (Kowl's relevant config [2])
- If a schema registry uses a self-signed certificate (or one signed by a corporation's CA), there's no way to pass the certificate through a config or skip validation (Kowl's relevant config [3]). As it is, you get a 500 error in the API call, but the UI doesn't show an error
1. https://github.com/provectus/kafka-ui/blob/master/kafka-ui-a...
2. https://github.com/cloudhut/kowl/blob/10776b81e45abfa716548d...
3. https://github.com/cloudhut/kowl/blob/10776b81e45abfa716548d...
Re: Show HN: UI for Apache Kafka
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't get over the amount of corporate memphis on that page.
> corporate memphis Links for the lazy. The GP page ( https://lenses.io ) certainly has a lot of good examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://t-artmagazine.com/what-is-corporate-memphis-and-why-...
Haha thank you. Had no idea.
Re: Show HN: UI for Apache Kafka
#34There are several alternatives posted here already, but after comparing several ones maybe a year ago I found Kowl very nice: Nice UI, backend written in Go (quick startup, low memory usage), viewing and filtering of messages, support for schema registry, comes with a Docker image, usable locally and Helm chart for Kubernetes. https://github.com/cloudhut/kowl
kowl is awesome. The only missing feature I've found is that when looking at groups, only lag is shown but not the actual position.
Re: Show HN: UI for Apache Kafka
#35I'm using kafdrop but modify it a bit. Reasons:
- the front page is very slow if there are a lot of topics (the kafka cluster I'm using has 6k topics). It's because kafdrop tries to get a lot of information of every topic even though it doesn't display them on the screen. I modified it like this: after display 6k topic names, I send ajax requests to get info (# of partitions, start & end offsets of each partition, number of messages in each partition) of 20 topics each.
- kafdrop doesn't have the feature to send a message to a topic. I added a text area below each topic name so that I can type the mesaage there and send.
- If there's a new message, kafdrop cannot tell me which partition that new message goes to. So I added this feature: suppose that a topic has 3 partitions with 3, 4 and 5 messages. If there are some new messages coming to that topic, I can refresh that topic in the UI and the UI will show something like partition 2: 3 -> 4 messages. So I know that 1 new message goes to partition 2.
I like the multi-cluster management feature of this project. Unfortunately I don't know react (angular + typescript is ok with me), so I'm wondering if I should try this one knowing that I cannot modify it. The reasons I modified kafdrop are also the features I like to see in a new Kafka UI.
Re: Show HN: UI for Apache Kafka
#36https://kpow.io - we build kPow for Apache Kafka, a drop-in replacement for Confluent Control Center + much more.
- Multi-Cluster, Multi-Schema, Multi-Connect.
- Multi-Tenancy, RBAC, all the Authz - LDAP, SAML, etc.
- Very fast streaming multi-topic search (~1M messages / minute)
- Built in JQ search filters (we implemented a subset of JQ in the browser and JVM)
- Live Kafka Streams / Consumer Group topology visualisation (including RocksDB metrics for state stores, etc)
- Offset management, resetting, scheduled mutations.
- Consumer Group read and Topic write freshness / n-minutes inactivity metrics.
- Heaps of admin functions like Staged Mutations, Temporary RBAC policies, Data Masking for PII, etc.
- Prometheus / OpenMetrics endpoints.
- kREPL (slightly mad programmatic interface to Kafka)
- 7k commits, 100k docker pulls, 97.4% Clojure.
- Unlimited users, unlimited features.
- Commercially supported, annual licenses or available as hourly-metered (0.16c/hr) on the AWS Marketplace or Red Hat Marketplace.
Re: Show HN: UI for Apache Kafka
#37https://kpow.io - we build kPow for Apache Kafka, a drop-in replacement for Confluent Control Center + much more. https://kpow.io/features - Multi-Cluster, Multi-Schema, Multi-Connect. - Multi-Tenancy, RBAC, all the Authz - LDAP, SAML, etc. - Very fast streaming multi-topic search (~1M messages / minute) - Built in JQ search filters (we implemented a subset of JQ in the browser and JVM) - Live Kafka Streams / Consume…
Multi-Tenancy is probably worth a link:
https://kpow.io/how-to/manage-kafka-visibility-with-multi-te...
kPow gives you the ability to restrict visibility of Kafka resources down to a group or topic level by user-role, then builds completely internally consistent synthetic cluster views for each tenant.
We have a number of large enterprise customers who requested multi-tenancy support, it sounded tough at first but due to how kPow is built (we compute our own metrics / no JMX) and the fact that we use Clojure in both the front/back end it turned out to be fairly straight forward to implement.
Re: Show HN: UI for Apache Kafka
#38https://kpow.io - we build kPow for Apache Kafka, a drop-in replacement for Confluent Control Center + much more. https://kpow.io/features - Multi-Cluster, Multi-Schema, Multi-Connect. - Multi-Tenancy, RBAC, all the Authz - LDAP, SAML, etc. - Very fast streaming multi-topic search (~1M messages / minute) - Built in JQ search filters (we implemented a subset of JQ in the browser and JVM) - Live Kafka Streams / Consume…
spoken to a few companies that have started using this internally - bit of a game changer apparently, kudos
Re: Show HN: UI for Apache Kafka
#39https://kpow.io - we build kPow for Apache Kafka, a drop-in replacement for Confluent Control Center + much more. https://kpow.io/features - Multi-Cluster, Multi-Schema, Multi-Connect. - Multi-Tenancy, RBAC, all the Authz - LDAP, SAML, etc. - Very fast streaming multi-topic search (~1M messages / minute) - Built in JQ search filters (we implemented a subset of JQ in the browser and JVM) - Live Kafka Streams / Consume…
spoken to a few companies that have started using this internally - bit of a game changer apparently, kudos
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: UI for Apache Kafka
#40I rolled out kPow initially for my team of 10 to help us manage and monitor our clusters.
We’ve now rolled it out to our 400+ engineers who use it every day to help them gain visibility and insight to their data and topics, manage offsets, amount other things. It handles HUGE clusters with no issue, and the RBAC features are great.
I’ve tried them all. While there are some ok alternatives, I honestly find them toys compared to kPow. Do yourself a favor and check it out!