Kafka Connect Monitoring Sandbox

The purpose of this repository is to provide a quick bootstrap way to set up Kafka Connect with Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud. In addition, it offers monitoring services through Prometheus and Grafana for both Confluent Platform components and Confluent Cloud. You can also configure alerting for your sandbox through AlertManager to test out a fully functional alerts.

Architecture

Sandbox Setup

Required software:

• IDE (e.g. Intellij)
• JDK 11
• Docker, Docker Compose
• Make

A. Download Kafka Connectors into connector-plugins:

Go to Confluent Hub to download any needed connectors and add it to the connector-plugins/ directory.

Confluent Cloud

Credentials

A. Create an env file (template) with the Confluent Cloud IDs and API Keys:

• Get Environment ID and Kafka Cluster ID via http://confluent.cloud or CLI:

confluent login 
confluent environment list
confluent kafka cluster list

and set CCLOUD_ENV & CCLOUD_CLUSTER values in the env file.

B. Then describe your Kafka cluster to get the bootstrap servers URL:

confluent kafka cluster describe ${CCLOUD_CLUSTER}

C. Similarly, enable Schema Registry in your environment, and get the details:

confluent schema-registry cluster describe

and set CCLOUD_SR & CCLOUD_SR_URL values in the env file.

D. Once IDs are defined, create API Keys:

Create API Keys for CCloud Exporter (Monitoring):

make ccloud-exporter-api-keys

and set CCLOUD_EXPORTER_API_KEY & CCLOUD_EXPORTER_API_SECRET values in the env file.

Create API Keys for Kafka Connect:

make ccloud-connect-api-keys

and set CCLOUD_CONNECT_API_KEY &CCLOUD_CONNECT_API_SECRET values in the env file.

and set values on env file.

Create API Keys for Applications:

Create Service Account:

make ccloud-app-service-account

and save ID as CCLOUD_SERVICE_ACCOUNT in the env file.

E. Create ACLs for Service Account:

make ccloud-app-acl

and finally create API Keys for the applications:

make ccloud-app-api-key

and set values on CCLOUD_API_KEY & CCLOUD_API_SECRET env file.

Run Self-Managed Connectors to Confluent Cloud

G. You can create topics with the Confluent CLI:

make ccloud-topic

H. Start Docker Compose

Verify that you have the env var $CP_VERSION set to the preferred CP version first.

make up

I. Deploy Datagen Connectors:

make ccloud-datagen-users

make ccloud-datagen-users-schema

J. Deploy MYSQL JDBC Connectors:

make ccloud-jdbc-bulk-mode-source

make ccloud-jdbc-incremental-mode-source

make ccloud-jdbc-timestamp-mode-source

make ccloud-jdbc-timestamp-mode-source

Finally, to monitor CCloud Cluster: go to Grafana http://localhost:3000 and check metrics:

Local Confluent Platform deployment

A. You can create topics with the kafka-utility command line:

make local-topic

B. Deploy one of the Datagen connectors:

make local-datagen-commercials

make local-datagen-inventory

C. Deploy MySQL JDBC connectors:

make local-jdbc-mysql

make local-jdbc-mysql-custom-query

make local-jdbc-sink

Monitoring & Alerting

You can view the connector metrics and Kafka broker metrics on Grafana

Visit http://localhost:3000/

• Username: admin
• Password: admin

Go to the Kafka Connect dashboard to see the connector metrics

To configure alerting, visit the alertmanager directory under the root directory of this project. One can set up the SMTP server in alertmanager.yml. Currently, mailhog is the SMTP server that alertmanager is using for notifications.

Custom alerts can be added in PromQL format to the alertrules.yml file in the alertmanager directory. Can visit the alerts in the UI at http://localhost:9093

Prometheus has alertmanager set up as its alerting target. Any metrics that have an alert threshold applied to it, will trigger an alert if that threshold is crossed and send it out to the alert notifications.

Alert notifications can be found in the mailhog UI at http://localhost:8025

How to Add Connectors

If you want to add a connector to this sandbox to test it out and see how it can be monitored, you can do so by doing the following.

• If the desired connector's plugin does not come with the Kafka Connect cluster, download and install the jar in the connector-plugins/ folder.

• Once the plugin has been added, create the connector config file and place it in either the ccloud or local directory depending on which cluster you want to read/write the data to.

• Deploy the newly added connector. Feel free to add the curl command to the Makefile to easily reuse it for the future.

References

• For a quick reference on what connector-configs should look like, visit the examples github repo. Here you can find examples of almost all the open source supported connect configs.