# Kafka Monitoring, Ready in Minutes

Consumer lag and broker health visible out of the box. Connect your cluster and you have real metrics within minutes — no custom exporters, no dashboard templates. Works alongside Prometheus and Grafana if you already have them.

[Book a Demo](https://www.conduktor.io/contact/demo)
[Get Started Free](https://www.conduktor.io/get-started)

## What You Actually Need to Monitor in Kafka

"Is the cluster up?" is the easy question. The hard ones are: which consumer group is falling behind, which broker just lost a replica, which connector task silently stopped processing. Most Kafka monitoring setups answer the first question and leave you guessing on the rest.

- **Consumer Lag Monitoring** — See consumer group lag across all partitions in real time. Identify which groups are behind, by how much, and since when. Set alerts on lag thresholds before backlogs become incidents.
- **Broker & Cluster Health** — Monitor broker metrics: under-replicated partitions, offline partition count, under-min-ISR partitions, disk usage, and message throughput. Detect broker issues before they cascade.
- **Topic Throughput** — Bytes in/out, message rate, and total message count per topic. Identify hot partitions and throughput bottlenecks. Compare metrics across time windows.
- **Connector Monitoring** — Track connector and task status and failed task counts. Know when a connector task fails without grepping through logs. Alert on task failures before they cause data gaps.
- **Schema Registry Health** — Monitor schema registry availability and schema registration rates. Detect schema compatibility errors before they cause producer failures.
- **Multi-Cluster Dashboard** — Aggregate metrics across all Kafka clusters (on-prem and cloud) in one view. Platform teams see the full estate; developers see their clusters.

## Alerting Before Problems Become Incidents

- **Consumer Lag Alerts** — Set thresholds per consumer group or topic. Get notified via Slack, Teams, email, or webhook when lag exceeds your SLA. Teams manage their own thresholds.
- **Under-Replicated Partition Alerts** — Immediate notification when partitions lose replicas. The first sign of broker trouble. Catch it before data is at risk or producers start failing.
- **Offline Partition Alerts** — Alert when any partition loses its leader. Offline partitions block producers and consumers immediately. Catch broker failures before they cascade to applications.
- **Connector Failure Alerts** — Alert when connector tasks fail. Each failed task stops data flowing through that connector. Set thresholds per connector and get notified before the gap becomes a problem.

## Enterprise Alerting for Multi-Team Kafka

Conduktor supports decentralized alert ownership. Each team manages alerts for their own topics and consumer groups without platform team intervention. Platform teams set baseline cluster-level alerts; product teams own application-level alerts.

## Frequently Asked Questions

**What metrics does Conduktor expose?**

Consumer group lag (per partition and per group), broker metrics (under-replicated partitions, offline partitions, under-min-ISR partitions, disk usage, message throughput), topic metrics (bytes in/out, message rate, message count), and connector task status and failure counts.

**Does Conduktor replace Prometheus + Grafana?**

Conduktor provides out-of-the-box Kafka monitoring without Prometheus setup. If you already have Prometheus/Grafana, Conduktor complements it. It adds the operational context (ownership, self-service, alerts) that raw metrics dashboards lack.

**How do we get notified about consumer lag?**

Set a lag threshold on any consumer group. When lag exceeds the threshold for a configured time window, Conduktor sends alerts to Slack, Teams, email, or webhook. Teams manage their own alert thresholds.

**Can we monitor multiple Kafka clusters in one dashboard?**

Yes. Conduktor Console connects to multiple clusters simultaneously. The unified dashboard shows cross-cluster consumer lag, broker health, and topic metrics across every environment.

**How is this different from Confluent Control Center?**

Confluent Control Center is designed for Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud. Conduktor works with any Kafka cluster (MSK, self-managed, Redpanda, Aiven) and adds multi-team features (ownership, access controls, self-service) that Control Center doesn't provide.

## Read more customer stories

- [Virgin Australia Saves 300 Hours/Month](https://www.conduktor.io/customer-stories/virgin-australia-increases-operational-efficiency-and-kafka-adoption-with-conduktor)
- [Swiss Post: 5x Kafka Growth with 800 Users](https://www.conduktor.io/customer-stories/how-swiss-post-governs-democratizes-kafka-usage)
- [Smart Farming: 10x Kafka Utilization on AWS](https://www.conduktor.io/customer-stories/accelerating-smart-farming-innovation-with-conduktor-and-amazon-msk)

## Set Up Kafka Monitoring in Minutes

Stop finding out about Kafka problems from angry Slack messages. Connect your cluster and see consumer lag, broker metrics, and alerts without writing a single Prometheus query.

[Get Started Free](https://www.conduktor.io/get-started) [Book a Demo →](https://www.conduktor.io/contact/demo)