Introduction In many companies, the use of Kafka is an integral part of the development process for high- load services and applications. Kafka isn't only a message broker but also a log splitter. In addition, with the help of Kafka, we can simulate various test scenarios. But to put this into practice, we need a tool for working with Kafka. So in today's topic, we will consider the most popular tools and touch on their functionality and capabilities. Kafka Tool One of the most popular tools for working with Kafka is the Kafka Tool. Its interface is pretty straightforward, and as the saying goes, the simpler, the better. This tool allows all our clusters, including all brokers, to view lists of topics and consumers. And in topics, we can read messages. This information is beneficial while testing various services that read topics and write to Kafka topics, but this is far from the full functionality of the Kafka Tool. Here, we can create your topics and partitions, which allows us to replace them in the configuration file with fake ones (created by the tester). Next, we can modify a specific message and send it to the topic we need, achieving our desired result. Kafka Console Consumer It is one of the applications that comes with Kafka, which allows reading data from it. Like Kafka itself is a JVM application and requires Java to be installed to run. The Kafka Tool also requires Java, but you can do without it in this case. To do this, we must run the Kafka Console Consumer via docker: You need to add before the command itself. docker run --rm -it taion809/kafka-cli:2.2.0 We're requesting here to run our image, display it all on our screen, and then delete that image when we finish. Lenses Another tool provides us with a user interface for monitoring Kafka clusters and at the same time offers quick access to data in messages. Lenses offer Kafka topics UI, a web-based tool for searching for topics, viewing their metadata, and downloading the messages themselves. We can also use this tool to set up real-time alerts, making it easier to manage incidents effectively. Lenses are possible to run in a docker container, and this tool is relatively lightweight, which will take only 4 GB. CMAK (former Kafka Manager) CMAK has a pretty good and relatively simple user interface. It allows to flexibly manage clusters, topics, and users and also monitor the performance of brokers, producers, and consumers. Moreover, it'll help us reassign existing partitions, delete or update their configuration. Kafdrop An open-source user interface for Kafka clusters displays information about brokers, topics, and sections and allows viewing messages. This lightweight Spring Boot application requires minimal configuration. Conclusion Each of the above tools has a place to be in the tester's work. However, Kafka Tool still seems the most convenient and valuable due to its extended functionality and additional features for creating various test scenarios. Of course, there are some inconveniences of sending a message with multiple headers. Due to the lack of a worthy alternative, this has to be put up with, hoping that it will be improved in future versions.
