13. Monitoring Kafka · Learn Labs

Source: Kafka: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Ed., Ch. 13 The problem this chapter solves: "The Apache Kafka applications have numerous measurements — so many, in fact, that it can easily become confusing as to what is important to watch and what can be set aside. ... They provide a detailed view into every operation in the broker, but they can also make you the bane of whoever is responsible for managing your monitoring system."

Note: this edition reverses the previous edition's central advice. The old guidance ("alert on under-replicated partitions") is explicitly retracted in favor of SLO-based alerting. See §3.2.

Sections

13.12
Metric basics
13.24
Service-level objectives
13.36
Kafka broker metricsThat's an important nuance: disk space isn't a gradual-degradation signal — it's a cliff.
13.48
The broker metrics reference
13.51
JVM and OS monitoringVia java.lang:type=OperatingSystem:
13.61
Logging
13.72
Client monitoringThis is the metric that tells you whether linger.ms is actually costing you what you think (Ch. 3 §5).
13.82
Lag monitoring
13.91
End-to-end monitoring
13.10Failure catalog
What actually breaks in production — Ch. 13 consolidated
13.112
The recommended monitoring stack
13.12Self-test
Self-test