A Comprehensive Overview of Kafka Monitoring Tools

After deploying Kafka in production, operators often need dedicated monitoring tools to simplify management. The Kafka community offers limited built‑in monitoring, so many users adopt third‑party frameworks. This article surveys the most widely used Kafka monitoring solutions.

JMX

JMX (Java Management Extensions) provides a standard way to monitor and manage Java applications, exposing metrics such as threads, memory, log levels, and service status. For simple monitoring scenarios, the community‑provided JMXTool can be sufficient, but more complex needs require dedicated frameworks.

Kafka Manager (now CMAK)

Yahoo created Kafka Manager, a web‑based UI that simplifies cluster administration, allowing users to view topic and partition distribution, manage multiple clusters, reassign replicas, and create topics. Installation is straightforward:

# Clone the source
git clone https://github.com/yahoo/kafka-manager

# Build with sbt (this may take a while)
./stb clean dist

After building, edit conf/application.conf to set kafka-manager.zkhosts to your ZooKeeper address, then start ZooKeeper and Kafka (setting JMX_PORT=9991 for monitoring), and finally launch Kafka Manager:

# Start ZooKeeper
zkServer start

# Start Kafka with JMX port
JMX_PORT=9991 kafka-server-start -daemon /usr/local/etc/kafka/server.properties

# Launch Kafka Manager
cd ../kafka-manager/bin
sh kafka-manager

Through the UI you can add a new cluster, specify its name and ZooKeeper address, and view metrics such as broker count, topic count, and consumer groups.

Kafka Eagle

Kafka Eagle is a visual monitoring system that supports multiple clusters, topic management (view, delete, create), consumer group monitoring, lag alerts, and health checks. Its feature set includes:

Display of broker, topic, and consumer counts, plus top‑10 topic log size and capacity.

Topic creation, preview, KSQL queries, data writes, and configuration.

Consumer‑group lag details with historical trend charts.

Cluster and ZooKeeper details, IPs, versions, startup times, and leader/follower status.

Core metrics such as message throughput, size trends, and ZooKeeper connection trends.

Alerting via email, DingTalk, WeChat, Webhook, etc.

User management with role‑based permissions.

Daily and 7‑day trends for producers, consumers, read/write speeds, and total records.

Kafka Eagle provides role‑based access (admin, developer, visitor) and can be installed from its GitHub repository or official website.

Source: https://github.com/smartloli/kafka-eagle/
Website: https://www.kafka-eagle.org/
Download: http://download.kafka-eagle.org/
Docs: https://docs.kafka-eagle.org/2.env-and-instal

Logi‑KafkaManager

Developed by Didi, Logi‑KafkaManager is a multi‑tenant Kafka cloud platform built from years of internal operational experience. It focuses on Kafka operation control, monitoring & alerting, and resource governance, and has been proven at large‑scale clusters with high user satisfaction.

The platform’s feature comparison with Kafka Manager is illustrated in the original article’s diagram. The source code is available on GitHub.

GitHub: https://github.com/didi/LogiKM

Summary

In addition to the tools described above, many organizations combine JMXTrans, InfluxDB, and Grafana to build custom, extensible monitoring stacks. Each framework has its own strengths, allowing users to choose the solution that best fits their operational requirements.