Like I mentioned our Kafka setup is relatively small - we moved from RabbitMQ to Kafka because of the sheer size (as in byte size) of the messages we needed to process (~10 million/hr), where each message could be 512-1024kb which caused RabbitMQ to blowup unpredictably.
Secondly, due to the difference in speed in the consumer and producer, we typically have an offset lag of around 10MM, and its important to monitor this lag for us because if it gets too high, then it means we are falling behind (our consumers scale up and down through the day to mitigate this).
Next, we use Go, which is not an official language supported by the project but has a library written by Shopify called Sarama. Sarama's consumer support had been in beta mode in a while, and in the past had caused some issues were every partition of a topic wasn't being consumed.
Lastly, at the time we thought creating new topics would be a semi-regular event, and that we might have dozens of them (this didn't pan out), but having a simple overview of the health of all of our topics and consumers was thought to be good too.
We found Yahoo's Kafka Manager[1], which has ended up being really useful for us in standing up and managing the cluster without resorting to the command line. It's been great, but it wasn't exactly super obvious for me to find at the time.
Currently the only metrics I don't have are things plottable things like processed/incoming msg/sec (per topic), lag over time and disk usage. I'm sure these are now easily ingested into grafana, I just haven't had the time to do it.
All of this information is great to have, but requires some setup, tuning, and elbow grease that is probably batteries included in a managed service. At the same time however, this is something you get almost out of the box with RabbitMQ's management plugin.
Secondly, due to the difference in speed in the consumer and producer, we typically have an offset lag of around 10MM, and its important to monitor this lag for us because if it gets too high, then it means we are falling behind (our consumers scale up and down through the day to mitigate this).
Next, we use Go, which is not an official language supported by the project but has a library written by Shopify called Sarama. Sarama's consumer support had been in beta mode in a while, and in the past had caused some issues were every partition of a topic wasn't being consumed.
Lastly, at the time we thought creating new topics would be a semi-regular event, and that we might have dozens of them (this didn't pan out), but having a simple overview of the health of all of our topics and consumers was thought to be good too.
We found Yahoo's Kafka Manager[1], which has ended up being really useful for us in standing up and managing the cluster without resorting to the command line. It's been great, but it wasn't exactly super obvious for me to find at the time.
Currently the only metrics I don't have are things plottable things like processed/incoming msg/sec (per topic), lag over time and disk usage. I'm sure these are now easily ingested into grafana, I just haven't had the time to do it.
All of this information is great to have, but requires some setup, tuning, and elbow grease that is probably batteries included in a managed service. At the same time however, this is something you get almost out of the box with RabbitMQ's management plugin.
[1] https://github.com/yahoo/kafka-manager