What is Kowl?
It is a web application that helps you to explore messages in your Apache Kafka cluster and get better insights on what is actually happening in your Kafka cluster in the most comfortable way.
Kowl is a tool in the Kafka Tools category of a tech stack.
Kowl is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Kowl's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Kowl?
Companies
4 companies reportedly use Kowl in their tech stacks, including Modanisa.com, Logistiq, and Gowit.
Developers
7 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Kowl.
Kowl Integrations
Kowl's Features
- Supports Kafka Clusters newer than v1.0+
- Topic overview
- Show disk usage per topic or per broker
- List all consumer groups of a given topic
- List topic configuration
- Message viewer
- Avro, JSON, XML, ASCII and binary support
- Search specific message using any filters written in JavaScript
- Consumer group lag monitoring
- Very good UI & UX
Kowl Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Kowl?
Kafka Manager
This interface makes it easier to identify topics which are unevenly distributed across the cluster or have partition leaders unevenly distributed across the cluster. It supports management of multiple clusters, preferred replica election, replica re-assignment, and topic creation. It is also great for getting a quick bird’s eye view of the cluster.
rdkafka
This gem is a modern Kafka client library for Ruby based on librdkafka. It wraps the production-ready C client using the ffi gem and targets Kafka 1.0+ and Ruby 2.3+.
Kafka REST
It provides a RESTful interface to a Kafka cluster. It makes it easy to produce and consume messages, view the state of the cluster, and perform administrative actions without using the native Kafka protocol or clients. Examples of use cases include reporting data to Kafka from any frontend app built in any language, ingesting messages into a stream processing framework that doesn't yet support Kafka, and scripting administrative actions.
Kafka UI
It is a simple tool that makes your data flows observable, helps find and troubleshoot issues faster and deliver optimal performance. Its lightweight dashboard makes it easy to track key metrics of your Kafka clusters - Brokers, Topics, Partitions, Production, and Consumption.
Kafdrop
It is a web UI for viewing Kafka topics and browsing consumer groups. The tool displays information such as brokers, topics, partitions, consumers, and lets you view messages.
