News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
Industry Apache Kafka 4.3.0: A guide for platform engineers
Kafka 4.3.0 covers broker cordoning, partition size metrics, share group tuning, and tiered storage fixes. Here's what platform engineers need to act on.
Product Data lineage support in Factor Platform
Learn how Factor Platform brings OpenLineage metadata into your Kafka environment, making data ownership, PII classification, and lineage visible by default.
Industry What the IBM-Confluent deal means for Kafka users
IBM's $11B Confluent acquisition raises questions for Kafka users. Assess your lock-in risk across Schema Registry, managed connectors, and operational tooling.
Best tools to manage Kafka ACLs
kafka-acls.sh, Terraform, kafka-gitops, Julie Ops, Strimzi, Klaw, Apache Ranger, OPA and the Kafka UIs, scored on auditability, pattern handling, automation, drift and visibility.
Best tools for Kafka audit logging
Kafka audit logging happens at three layers: broker authorization logs, the audit trail of the tools people use, and data lineage. Every option for each layer, scored on the same rubric.
Best tools to manage Kafka broker configs
kafka-configs.sh, Strimzi, Terraform, JulieOps, AKHQ, Kafbat UI, Confluent Control Center and Kpow, scored on seeing the running config, catching drift, changing it safely and knowing who changed it.
Best tools to monitor Kafka broker health
Prometheus with the JMX Exporter, kafka_exporter, KMinion, Cruise Control, Datadog, New Relic, Confluent Control Center and Kpow, scored on the broker signals they actually see: ISR, offline partitions, controller, request latency, disk and JVM.
Best tools to monitor Kafka Connect connectors
Kafka Connect monitoring tools, from the REST API and JMX to Strimzi, Kpow and Lenses, scored on task state, per-task metrics, restarts, alerting and access.
How to diagnose and fix a failed Kafka Connect connector
A connector reporting RUNNING while its tasks have FAILED, a stack trace in the status endpoint, and a restart that fails again a minute later. The diagnostic sequence, and how to tell a connector fault from a limit in the external system.
Best tools to monitor Kafka consumer lag
Kafka consumer lag tools compared on one rubric: client-side vs cluster-side measurement, offset lag vs time lag, per-partition detail and trend alerting. Covers the CLI, JMX, Burrow, kafka_exporter, KMinion, Kpow, UIs and managed consoles.
How to find and mask PII in Kafka topics
An audit finds card numbers or emails readable in a Kafka topic. How to find every field that carries PII, choose where to mask it, and prove the masking holds, with the commands for each step.
Best tools for Kafka data masking
Kafka data masking tools hide sensitive fields at ingestion, in the client, in a proxy or at view time. Eleven options scored on what each placement protects against.