Just released: Kadeck 4.3

We are excited to announce the availability of the Kadeck 4.3 Kafka UI platform. The new release contains many new features that make it easier for Apache Kafka developers, as well as Apache Kafka infrastructure and operations people to be more productive with Kafka.

4.3 highlights include:

• New Consumers view
• Topic (API) Documentation
• Easier Kafka topic and data browsing

Get Kadeck 4.3!

Read onwards to learn more about new Kafka UI features in Kadeck 4.3.

Consumers View

The new Consumers View allows you to see and sort all Consumer Groups in a cluster at once. Troubleshooting consumer groups is an important task in Apache Kafka environments. This includes identifying slow consumers, skipping "poison pills" (records that always crash the consumer), as well as cleaning up orphaned consumer groups that are no longer needed.

Kadeck offers a variety of functions and metrics for these tasks, which can be accessed via the Consumers view. 

This new view allows you to quickly identify slow Consumer Groups or find Consumer Groups without knowing in advance the Topic from which they consume. It is also possible to delete empty consumers. Controlling access to Consumer details for your team is fully enforced.

Setting the Stage for Kafka Monitoring

With the addition of new Consumer Group insights in Kadeck 4.3, we’ve finished setting the stage for groundbreaking, new Kafka monitoring functionality due out later this year. Kadeck will provide a comprehensive overview of your entire Apache Kafka cluster in a single location, and help operations identify issues before they escalate and impact system stability. Kafka monitoring capabilities will include:

• Tracking Kafka performance and health across all key areas, including clusters, topics, and consumers, to ensure no issue goes unnoticed.
• Providing comprehensive monitoring of cluster and topic metrics, including message rates, data size, throughput, latency, error rates, and partition distribution. It also identifies unused topics to help you reduce storage costs.
• Intelligent Kafka Health Assistants automatically report on Apache Kafka cluster performance issues in real-time, and recommend solutions to get your clusters working smoothly again.

API Documentation for Your Kafka Topics

In a dynamic environment where numerous Kafka topics are being managed, it's essential to have a clear understanding of each topic's purpose and usage. In Kadeck 4.3, you can now easily create and manage API documentations for your Kafka topics.

This new feature provides: 

• Templates that make creating API documentation for every topic very easy. 
• Visualizations and topic labeling features that help you ensure documentation is complete and up to date.
• Integration with Confluence if you want to link to documentation there from Kadeck.

Early 4.3 users have been really excited by this feature because it helps improve topic comprehension, accelerates troubleshooting, makes it easier to onboard new team members, and helps keep the current topic’s consumers, producers and schemas up to date.

Data Catalog Performance Update

The Data Catalog is where Kadeck users do much of their Kafka data exploration and monitoring. In version 4.3 the Data Catalog is now even more powerful. Keep track of disk space by sorting by log sizes and see partition and replication issues at a glance. Color-coding connections for dev, test, and production environments gives you a better overall view of your Apache Kafka infrastructure. 

Other Data Catalog improvements include:

• A new "Topic Overview" view has been added and is now the default view when clicking on a topic name in the Data Catalog. This new view is essentially the home page for your topic and provides information about the number of records, data ownership, the new topic documentation, partitions, and topic configuration, as well as many other metrics.
• The Topic Configuration view has been moved to the new “Topic Overview”, and now shows more stats at a glance, including the replication factor, retention, compaction and more. 
• Introduction of flexible tables. With movable and resizable table columns, Kadeck has more of a spreadsheet feel to it, which your data analysts will love.

And Other New Stuff…

• Create and manage all types of quotas using the new Quota View.
• Define password policies to make your deployment even more secure.
• Mask sensitive data with Data Protection Policies and Data Masking.
• Shareable data views make collaborative development and debugging easier.
• Access control improvements including fine-grained consumer permissions: these can now be set to Write, Read, and Delete for all or specific consumer groups.
• And many other user-driven UX improvements.

What’s next?

If you’re not already a Kadeck user, you can start here with a free-forever version for yourself or your team:

Get Kadeck!

And while you’re experiencing 4.3, feel free to contact us if you have questions or input about the new Kafka monitoring functionality we are preparing to deliver. We’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Enjoy!

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