---
title: "Kafka integration | Grafana Labs"
description: "Monitoring Apache Kafka"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Kafka integration

The Kafka integration monitors Apache Kafka clusters, including brokers, topics, and consumer groups. Consumer lag metrics and alerts show when consumers fall behind producers.

|                    |                                                                                             |
|--------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **What it’s for**  | Monitoring broker health, consumer lag, and message throughput                              |
| **Under the hood** | Collects broker and JVM metrics via a JMX exporter, plus consumer lag from a Kafka exporter |

## Metrics collected

The integration collects metrics across brokers, topics, and consumers:

- **Broker**: JVM, requests, replication
- **Topics**: Messages in/out, partitions
- **Consumer**: Lag, offset, group status
- **ZooKeeper**: Connections, latency (if used)

## What to know

This integration offers:

- Prebuilt dashboards, including overview, topics, and Kafka Connect. The integration reference also lists logs, Schema Registry, ZooKeeper, and ksqldb dashboards.
- Prebuilt alerts: consumer lag, broker health
- Partition distribution visibility
- Setup needs JMX access to the brokers.

* * *

## Set it up

Open this path in your Grafana Cloud stack for a fully interactive experience, or read through it to understand the process first.

Learning path

#### Monitor Kafka with Grafana Cloud

Welcome to the Kafka monitoring learning path that shows you how to use Grafana Alloy to send Kafka metrics to Grafana Cloud for comprehensive event streaming observability.

22 min

Beginner

Docs & blog posts

#### Open in Grafana Cloud

Complete this learning path directly in your Grafana Cloud stack with an interactive learning experience.

[Open in Grafana Cloud]()

[View on website](/docs/learning-paths/kafka-monitoring/)