Kafkaesque

A focused Kafka monitoring dashboard, API, and CLI. Monitor cluster health, topic activity, consumer lag, and Slack lag alerts from one read-only interface.

Why Kafkaesque?

Monitoring Kafka is essential, but it shouldn't be tedious. The standard CLI works well for quick checks, while broader observability platforms can introduce more complexity than a team needs just to understand its Kafka cluster.

Kafkaesque is an open-source, read-only Kafka monitoring tool that brings essential cluster insights into one place. Its web dashboard lets developers and operators inspect cluster health, brokers, topics, hourly message rates, consumer groups, and partition lag.

It also supports configurable Slack alerts for consumer lag, with follow-up notifications when lag is resolved.

Kafkaesque never produces messages or modifies Kafka resources. PostgreSQL is used exclusively for application accounts, sessions, roles, permissions, and alert subscriptions, never for storing Kafka messages or historical metrics.

The UI and API share the same authenticated Kafka connection and collectors. Browser users authenticate through secure session cookies, API clients use opaque access and refresh tokens, and the standalone CLI connects directly to Kafka.

Built with simplicity in mind

The goal is to give Kafka developers and operators a focused way to understand what's happening in their clusters without introducing unnecessary infrastructure or complexity.

Explore the project: https://github.com/nikhil25803/kafkaesque

Give it a try, explore the code, and feel free to contribute or share your feedback!