Getting started with Kafka client metrics

Apache Kafka stands as a widely recognized open source event store and stream processing platform. It has evolved into the de facto standard for data streaming, as over 80% of Fortune 500 companies use it. All major cloud providers provide managed data streaming services to meet this growing demand.

One key advantage of opting for managed Kafka services is the delegation of responsibility for broker and operational metrics, allowing users to focus solely on metrics specific to applications. In this article, Product Manager Uche Nwankwo provides guidance on a set of producer and consumer metrics that customers should monitor for optimal performance.

With Kafka, monitoring typically involves various metrics that are related to topics, partitions, brokers and consumer groups. Standard Kafka metrics include information on throughput, latency, replication and disk usage. Refer to the Kafka documentation and relevant monitoring tools to understand the specific metrics available for your version of Kafka and how to interpret them effectively.