Kafka WebView

This project aims to be a full-featured web-based Apache Kafka consumer. Kafka WebView presents an easy-to-use web based interface for reading data out of kafka topics and providing basic filtering and searching capabilities.

Features

• Connect to multiple remote Kafka Clusters
• Connect to SSL authenticated clusters
• Supports standard key and value deserializers
• Supports uploading custom key and value deserializers
• Supports both customizable and enforced filtering over topics
• Basic user management
• Web Based Consumer Supports
  • Seeking to offsets
  • Seeking to timestamps
  • Filtering by partition
  • Configurable server-side filtering logic
• "Live" web socket based streaming consumer

Screen Shots

Web Consumer

Streaming Consumer

Configuration

Installation from release distribution

Download the latest release package and extract the ZIP file.

Configuration

Edit the config.yml file at the root of the extracted package.

The server port can be modified to set what port Kafka WebView UI will bind to.

The app key should be modified to be unique to your installation. This key will be used for symmetric encryption of JKS/TrustStore secrets if you configure any SSL enabled Kafka clusters.

By default config.yml will look similar to:

server:
  port: 8080

security:
  require-ssl: false

## Various App Configs
app:
  key: "SuperSecretKey"

Starting the service

The Kafka WebView UI can be started by running the start.sh script from root of the extracted package. This should start a webserver running on the port you configured. Point your browser at http://your.host.name:8080 or the port that you configured and follow the Logging in for the first time instructions below.

Running from docker image

Docker images can be found on Docker Hub.

Start up the latest docker image by running docker run -it -p 8080:8080 -v kafkawebview_data:/app/data sourcelaborg/kafka-webview:latest

Point your browser at http://localhost:8080 and follow the Logging in for the first time instructions below.

Building from source

To build and run from the latest source code requires JDK 1.8 and Maven 3.3.9+. Clone this project and run the buildAndRun.sh script to compile the project and start the service.

Point your browser at http://localhost:8080 follow the Logging in for the first time instructions below.

Logging in for the first time

On first start up a default Administrator user will be created for you. Login using admin@example.com with password admin

NOTE After logging in you should create your own Administrator user and remove the default account.

Setup

1. Setup users

You first need to configure who has access to Kafka WebView. Kafka WebView provides two roles for users: Admin and User.

• Admin has the ability to Manage and Configure all aspects of WebView, including defining Kafka Clusters, adding/removing users, defining Views etc.
• User has the ability to view Cluster information and consume previously defined Views.

NOTE If you've logged in with the Default Admin account, you'll want to create your own Administrator user account and remove the default one.

2. Connect Kafka clusters

You'll need to let WebView know about what Kafka clusters you want to connect.

WebView supports connecting to Clusters using plaintext or SSL. You'll need to follow the standard Kafka consumer client directions to create a Java Key Store (JKS) for your Trusted CA (TrustStore), and a JKS for your Consumer Key (KeyStore).

3. Configure custom Message Formats (Optional)

Kafka allows you to store data within the Cluster in any data-format and provides an Interface to define how clients should Deserialize your data. Out of the box Kafka WebView supports the following Deserializers that can be used for both Keys and Values:

• ByteArray
• Bytes
• Double
• Float
• Integer
• Long
• Short
• String

Often times data is stored using a custom format such as Avro or ProtocolBuffers. Admin users can upload a JAR containing custom Deserializer implementations to extend support to WebView to be able to properly deserialize your data format.

4. Configure Filters (Optional)

Filters are a construct unique to WebView. Filters allow you to implement an Interface that can be used on the server side to filter messages coming from Kafka. There are several benefits to doing filtering on the server side in this way. These can be used as a simple search-like filter and avoid passing large amounts of data to the client web browser when you're looking for a small subset of messages. Filters could also be used to enforce a restricted view of data from a Topic.

5. Define Views

Views are the last step putting all of the pieces together. Views let you configure a Topic to consume from, configure which Message Formats the Topic uses, and optionally apply any Filters.

Writing Custom Deserializers

The Deserializer Interface is provided by Kafka, WebView requires nothing special or additional above implementing this interface. If you already have a Deserializer implementation for consuming from Kafka then you simply can just use it as is.

If you don't already have an implementation, you can view the interface here.

Writing Custom Filters

The RecordFilter Interface is provided by Kafka WebView and is NOT part of the standard Kafka library.

Example Deserializer and Filters Project

To get up and going quickly, the Kafka-WebView-Example project on GitHub can be cloned and used as a template. This Maven based example project is configured with all of the correct dependencies and has a few example implementations.

Changelog

The format is based on Keep a Changelog and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

View Changelog