Kafka on Samarthya

Reading Kafka JMX Data Without Getting Lost in the Numbers

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The first JMX screen I opened contained more metrics than I knew what to do with. Every number looked important. After a while I started grouping them by the question I was trying to answer instead of building a dashboard from every available bean.

Kafka JMX: What to Enable and What It Actually Measures

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Kafka was running, producers were sending messages, and yet I still felt I was operating it by looking at the console and guessing. I wanted numbers that could tell me whether the broker was busy, whether consumers were falling behind, and whether replication was healthy.

Securing Kafka Brokers: A Practical Operations Checklist

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I used to think of Kafka security as a client configuration problem. Then I started thinking about the broker host itself: which user owns the process, who can read the configuration, what is exposed on the network, and what happens during an incident.

Securing Kafka: Start with Identity, Transport, and Authorization

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I started looking at Kafka security, I found myself jumping straight to configuration properties. That was backwards. I found it easier to ask three questions first:

Written up in October 2026 from my notes at the time. The configuration snippets and verification output are illustrative and contain no real credentials.

Can the client prove who it is?
Can the client communicate privately with the broker?
Is that identity allowed to perform this operation?

These are authentication, encryption, and authorization. Configuring one does not automatically provide the others.

Kafka Cluster Fundamentals: Brokers, Topics, and Partitions

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spent a fair amount of time looking at Kafka command output before the vocabulary settled in my head. Once I understood the difference between a broker, a topic, and a partition, the cluster stopped looking like one large mysterious system.

ZooKeeper Explained: Coordination Behind a Kafka Cluster

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When I first came across ZooKeeper in a Kafka deployment, I treated it as another dependency that had to be started before Kafka. That explanation was not good enough. I wanted to know what it was actually doing when a broker disappeared or a controller changed.

Kafka Streams

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000

In today’s data-driven world, the ability to process information in real-time is crucial. Kafka Streams emerges as a powerful tool for building real-time applications and microservices that leverage the Apache Kafka distributed streaming platform.

Trust Store: Apache Kafka

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Recreated in October 2026 from the post; the original image was lost

In Apache Kafka, trust store and keystore are essential components for ensuring secure communication between brokers, clients, and other services. In this blog post, we will discuss the concept of trust store and keystore in detail, their importance, and why we use them in Apache Kafka.

Zookeeper mTLS

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 12:00:00 +0000

A bad way to spend one’s Friday, but at least I am ending it on a good note. — ~ Friday guru

I was struggling with the mTLS configuration for zookeeper configuration and somehow no matter what I do I kept getting an error as below

Naming Convention Policy for Kafka topics

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Creating a Topic in a kafka-cluster is easy and well documented for the kafka-topics.sh or even the official API documentation.

 bin/kafka-topics.sh --help

The complexity arises, when you are trying to enforce a standard way of defining topic naming. There are many ways to identify the right convention based on your need, but to enforce such a topic convention while you are creating one is explained in this 5 steps blog.

JMX: Monitoring and Managing Kafka

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 12:00:00 +0000

💬 The Java virtual machine (Java VM) has built-in instrumentation that enables you to monitor and manage it using the Java Management Extensions (JMX) technology.

To enable and configure monitoring of Java VM for any java-application using the ready-to-use JMX agent, you must set certain system properties when you start the Java VM.

Kafka: Deploy & Test

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 08:17:19 +0000

While I continue to learn more about architecture and design of kafka, a quickstart to deploy & test kafka is a must.

Step 1: Add Chart Repo
#

In my local system it is already present which was confirmed by the listing

Event Streaming

Thu, 20 Jan 2022 08:06:56 +0000

While reading Apache Kafka it was interesting analogy that they described

Event streaming is the digital equivalent of the human body’s central nervous system. — Apache Kafka

It draws a great parallel between how the central nervous system allows for real time event generations and consumption in terms of reflex actions. The examples are well explained and captured here.