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Show HN: Kowl – An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX
- jasonvorhe 6y agoThis looks dope, I'll check it out after my vacation for our Kafka clusters. I haven't yet found a decent web interface for Kafka. For cluster overview there's cruise-control but apart from that it all feels too messy and the UX is often more of an afterthought. Thanks for doing this. I hope your enterprise features provide you with sufficient revenue to keep this going. If not, maybe offer a donation button somewhere?
- weeco 6y agoWe don't have any expectations or force to make money with Kowl. Besides that we already use Kowl at our company where engineers use it with joy in their daily business. We don't only get valuable feedback from colleagues who use Kowl, but our employer does also sponsor our efforts with working time. If it ultimately turns out to be not profitable at all we will simply open source everything I guess.
- klden007 6y agoI also can recommend https://github.com/tchiotludo/akhq https://github.com/tchiotludo/akhq for basic Kafka management
- mwaitjmp 6y agoThis looks great. Does it support avro via the schema registry?
- fourseventy 6y agoI was looking for something like this about a year ago but no open source solution existed. Thank you!
- pandemic_region 6y agoyou must not have looked for long, most of the other OSS tools mentioned in this thread exist for several years already.
- secondcoming 6y agoThese ones (stolen from another comment)? > CMAK, AKHQ, Kafdrop, Kowl, Conduktor, Kafkatool Maybe if they had been given better, more descriptive, names they'd have been easier to fit
- weeco 6y agoSome of these had more descriptive names, but the apache software foundation doesn't allow names with "Kafka" as part of the name because it's a protected trademark apparently.
- tchiotludo 6y agoI confirm ! I need to rename KafkaHQ to AKHQ : https://twitter.com/akhq_io/status/1240037275565727744 https://twitter.com/akhq_io/status/1240037275565727744 Apache Committee ask to rename the project as CMAK and others ...
- tutfbhuf 6y agoOur company uses https://github.com/obsidiandynamics/kafdrop https://github.com/obsidiandynamics/kafdrop it's FOSS. It can also handle AVRO and PROTOBUF messages.
- pridkett 6y agoDoes your company use both Avro and Protobuf for message serialization? Most places tend to standardize with one or the other and I’m wondering if there is a use case for both.
- abledon 6y agoCMAK, AKHQ, Kafdrop, Kowl, Conduktor, Kafkatool etc.... why are there so many attempts to build a kafka UI? Does each one have its own use case? I'd think that something as large as "Kafka" in the software ecosystem would have a goto defacto standard UI for managing it.
- weeco 6y agoYou are absolutely right, there are many options which we looked at before we began with the project. None of existing solutions provided the features we needed: Authentication and authorization to meet our compliance needs, a satisfactory UI/UX, message streaming with JavaScript filters and a couple more features. We thought we can do better and just started hacking something. There's a lot more to come. I'll create a blog post describing in more detail why we've created Kowl.
- tutfbhuf 6y agoThere are also many different UIs for kubernetes.
- vogtb 6y agoHaving looked into a couple of these, it seems like they each have their own sort of focus, which makes sense. From my own experience, and talking to other engineers, companies use kafka for: an http replacement that lets subscribers have down time, a way to record and replay time series data, a tool for buffering to some async path, or general pub-sub event bus. Sometimes all of these at once! Each one has it's only operational patterns, so having UIs that focus on these patterns sorta clicks with me. That said, it's been a while since kafka gained popularity, so it's surprising we've not seen any coalesce into a main contender.
- tspann 6y agoI use Streams Messenging Manager supports schema registry for avro. Also includes alerts and many metrics and stats
- mrorange27 6y agoI will stick to using https://github.com/deviceinsight/kafkactl https://github.com/deviceinsight/kafkactl in the shell.
- jasonvorhe 6y agoThis is amazing, thanks for pointing me to it. I googled around for better tooling but apart from a few "playing around with golang/rust"-cli tools I didn't find anything with better UX than the abysmal shell script tooling provided with Kafka.
- taf2 6y agoSlightly off topic but for the shell in the example what did they export PS1 to get the nice looking solid background color for the host name and current working directory?
- eat_veggies 6y agoLooks like some type of powerline plugin for their shell https://github.com/b-ryan/powerline-shell https://github.com/b-ryan/powerline-shell
- mrweasel 6y agoVery nice, I think we’ll give it a shot on our test cluster tomorrow, we been looking for something like this, both for ourself, but also for a customer.
- siddharthgoel88 6y agoJust wondering if there is also a plan to support PROTOBUF? Kowl looks to have a pretty decent UI. Thanks for making this one. Thanks to @tutbhuf for mention of kafdrop. Will check it out as well.
- larsroholm 6y agoJust tried using it a bit. Seems nice and fast. But I am really lacking the ability to inspect message headers. Is that on the roadmap?
- weeco 6y agoActually we haven't thought about message headers as we haven't used them for so long. Please submit an issue in GitHub and it would be awesome if you describe how you are using headers (what do you use them for?). I think we should definitely support that.
- Nikhil833032 6y agoYes that is really helpful