Chapter 12. Kafka Exporter
Kafka Exporter is an open source project to enhance monitoring of Apache Kafka brokers and clients. Kafka Exporter is provided with AMQ Streams for deployment with a Kafka cluster to extract additional metrics data from Kafka brokers related to offsets, consumer groups, consumer lag, and topics.
The metrics data is used, for example, to help identify slow consumers.
Lag data is exposed as Prometheus metrics, which can then be presented in Grafana for analysis.
If you are already using Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring of built-in Kafka metrics, you can configure Prometheus to also scrape the Kafka Exporter Prometheus endpoint.
Additional resources
12.1. Consumer lag
Consumer lag indicates the difference in the rate of production and consumption of messages. Specifically, consumer lag for a given consumer group indicates the delay between the last message in the partition and the message being currently picked up by that consumer. The lag reflects the position of the consumer offset in relation to the end of the partition log.
This difference is sometimes referred to as the delta between the producer offset and consumer offset, the read and write positions in the Kafka broker topic partitions.
Suppose a topic streams 100 messages a second. A lag of 1000 messages between the producer offset (the topic partition head) and the last offset the consumer has read means a 10-second delay.
The importance of monitoring consumer lag
For applications that rely on the processing of (near) real-time data, it is critical to monitor consumer lag to check that it does not become too big. The greater the lag becomes, the further the process moves from the real-time processing objective.
Consumer lag, for example, might be a result of consuming too much old data that has not been purged, or through unplanned shutdowns.
Reducing consumer lag
Typical actions to reduce lag include:
- Scaling-up consumer groups by adding new consumers
- Increasing the retention time for a message to remain in a topic
- Adding more disk capacity to increase the message buffer
Actions to reduce consumer lag depend on the underlying infrastructure and the use cases AMQ Streams is supporting. For instance, a lagging consumer is less likely to benefit from the broker being able to service a fetch request from its disk cache. And in certain cases, it might be acceptable to automatically drop messages until a consumer has caught up.
12.2. Kafka Exporter alerting rule examples
If you performed the steps to introduce metrics to your deployment, you will already have your Kafka cluster configured to use the alert notification rules that support Kafka Exporter.
The rules for Kafka Exporter are defined in prometheus-rules.yaml, and are deployed with Prometheus. For more information, see Prometheus.
The sample alert notification rules specific to Kafka Exporter are as follows:
UnderReplicatedPartition- An alert to warn that a topic is under-replicated and the broker is not replicating to enough partitions. The default configuration is for an alert if there are one or more under-replicated partitions for a topic. The alert might signify that a Kafka instance is down or the Kafka cluster is overloaded. A planned restart of the Kafka broker may be required to restart the replication process.
TooLargeConsumerGroupLag- An alert to warn that the lag on a consumer group is too large for a specific topic partition. The default configuration is 1000 records. A large lag might indicate that consumers are too slow and are falling behind the producers.
NoMessageForTooLong- An alert to warn that a topic has not received messages for a period of time. The default configuration for the time period is 10 minutes. The delay might be a result of a configuration issue preventing a producer from publishing messages to the topic.
Adapt the default configuration of these rules according to your specific needs.
12.3. Kafka Exporter metrics
Lag information is exposed by Kafka Exporter as Prometheus metrics for presentation in Grafana.
Kafka Exporter exposes metrics data for brokers, topics and consumer groups.
The data extracted is described here.
Table 12.1. Broker metrics output
| Name | Information |
|---|---|
|
| Number of brokers in the Kafka cluster |
Table 12.2. Topic metrics output
| Name | Information |
|---|---|
|
| Number of partitions for a topic |
|
| Current topic partition offset for a broker |
|
| Oldest topic partition offset for a broker |
|
| Number of in-sync replicas for a topic partition |
|
| Leader broker ID of a topic partition |
|
|
Shows |
|
| Number of replicas for this topic partition |
|
|
Shows |
Table 12.3. Consumer group metrics output
| Name | Information |
|---|---|
|
| Current topic partition offset for a consumer group |
|
| Current approximate lag for a consumer group at a topic partition |
12.4. Enabling the Kafka Exporter Grafana dashboard
If you deployed Kafka Exporter with your Kafka cluster, you can enable Grafana to present the metrics data it exposes.
A Kafka Exporter dashboard is provided in the examples/metrics directory as a JSON file:
-
strimzi-kafka-exporter.json
Prerequisites
This procedure assumes you already have access to the Grafana user interface and Prometheus has been added as a data source. If you are accessing the user interface for the first time, see Grafana.
Procedure
- Access the Grafana user interface.
Click Dashboards, then Import to open the Import Dashboard window and import the example Kafka Exporter dashboard (or paste the JSON).
When metrics data has been collected for some time, the Kafka Exporter charts are populated.
Kafka Exporter Grafana charts
From the metrics, you can create charts to display:
- Message in per second (from topics)
- Message in per minute (from topics)
- Lag by consumer group
- Messages consumed per minute (by consumer groups)
Use the Grafana charts to analyze lag and to check if actions to reduce lag are having an impact on an affected consumer group. If, for example, Kafka brokers are adjusted to reduce lag, the dashboard will show the Lag by consumer group chart going down and the Messages consumed per minute chart going up.
