Consumer groups, assignment strategies, static membership and the two timeouts that decide when a member is gone. Ten new scenarios that make the rebalance — Kafka's most misunderstood moment — something you can watch instead of guess at.
Kafka Simulator v1.1 adds ten scenarios covering producer batching, partitioning, compression, backpressure, retries, and idempotence.
KIP-714 lets Kafka clients push their own metrics to brokers over OTLP. monedula-metrics-reporter now forwards those metrics too, next to broker SPI and Yammer metrics.
Kafka's most important lessons live in the transitions: before and after a broker dies, before and after the ISR shrinks. We built a browser-based simulator so you can break a cluster safely and watch exactly why it reacts the way it does.
Moving an existing Kafka estate from ACLs to Confluent RBAC is a risk-management exercise, not a syntax conversion. Here's a safe, auditable, repeatable migration workflow — and the tool we built for it.
Why Kafka metrics are painful, why JMX dashboards often show no data, and how to export Kafka metrics natively over OTLP.