News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
Best Kafka CLI tools
Kafka CLIs scored on coverage, contexts, auth, agent safety, maintenance and annual cost: the bundled scripts, kcat, kafkactl, kaf, kcl, rpk, Confluent CLI, Zoe, kt and the Kpow CLI.
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 reports RUNNING while its tasks have FAILED. The diagnostic sequence, and how to tell a connector fault from a limit in the external system it writes to.
Best tools to monitor Kafka consumer lag
Kafka consumer lag tools compared on one rubric: client-side against cluster-side measurement, offset lag against time lag, per-partition detail and alerting. The CLI, JMX, Burrow, Kpow and more.
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.
How to diagnose a Kafka deserialization error
A consumer throwing SerializationException and looping on one offset has one of five causes. How to tell which, and how to unblock the partition without losing data.
Best tools to control destructive Kafka operations
Topic deletes, offset resets and config changes run the moment they are allowed. Every control that stops a bad one, from broker settings and authorizers to GitOps and Kafka UIs, scored on one rubric.
Best tools to manage a dead letter queue in Kafka
Kafka DLQ tools compared on one rubric: error context, triage, repair, targeted replay and governance. Covers Kafka Connect, Spring Kafka, Kafka Streams, kcat, Kpow, AKHQ and Kafbat UI.