---
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 provides **streaming platform monitoring** for Apache Kafka clusters, including brokers, topics, and consumer groups.

|                    |                                                                               |
|--------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **What it’s for**  | Monitoring broker health, consumer lag, and message throughput                |
| **Who uses it**    | Data engineers, platform teams, anyone running Kafka streaming infrastructure |
| **Under the hood** | Collects JMX metrics from Kafka brokers via the JMX exporter                  |

## Metrics collected

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

## Trade-offs

**Best for:** Apache Kafka clusters and streaming architectures

| Pros                                          | Cons                              |
|-----------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------|
| Pre-built dashboards: broker, topic, consumer | JMX configuration required        |
| Pre-built alerts: consumer lag, broker health | High cardinality with many topics |
| Partition distribution visibility             | Complex metric space              |

* * *

## Learning path

Deploy this integration step by step.

[Kafka integration](/docs/learning-hub/intro-to-integrations/02-hands-on/19a-kafka-journey/)