Introduction to the Kafka Extension

The Steadybit Kafka Extension allows you to create chaos and simultaneously check the behavior of your consumer groups.

Integration and Functionality

Integration of Kafka into Steadybit works via the franz-go client library. The extension-kafka utilizes these capabilities and may require elevated rights on the Kafka side to:

• List brokers, topics, consumer groups, and offsets
• Elect leaders for partitions
• Alter broker configurations
• Create and delete ACLs
• Delete records

Integration of Kafka in Steadybit

Alter Broker configuration in various ways:

• Reduce the max batch size of messages
• Limit the IO/Network threads per broker
• Limit the rate of creation of new connections

You can also run these actions:

• Elect new leaders for partitions
• Produce records either with a fixed amount or with a fixed rate per second
• Deny access to a topic for a consumer
• Trigger a delete record request

In parallel, you can check:

• The current lag of a topic for a consumer group
• The state of a consumer group
• The partition activity for a given topic (leader election, replicas going offline or in-sync, new replica order)

Installation and Setup

To integrate the Kafka extension with your environment, follow our setup guide.