What is Burrow.io?

Burrow.io is an open-source monitoring platform designed specifically for Apache Kafka. It provides visibility into the health of a Kafka cluster and the consumer lag of Kafka topics.

Some of the key features of Burrow include:

• Consumer lag monitoring - Burrow continuously monitors how far behind consumers are from the latest message produced to a topic partition. This helps identify issues with consumers not being able to keep up.
• Cluster health checks - Burrow monitors the state of each broker, controller, partition replica, and ISR to provide insights into the overall health of the Kafka cluster.
• Automatic partition rebalancing - When consumer lag issues extend beyond a configurable threshold, Burrow can automatically rebalance partitions between consumer groups to help restore adequate processing capacity.
• Easy-to-use dashboard - Burrow comes with a simple dashboard showing graphs and stats around lag, cluster health, consumer status, and other key metrics. It provides at-a-glance visibility into Kafka.
• Alerting integration - Burrow can integrate with alerting systems like email, HTTP callback, Slack, and PagerDuty to send real-time notifications when issues are detected.

Overall, Burrow acts as an effective companion tool to Kafka, helping operators monitor, diagnose, and respond to issues quickly. Its dedicated focus on Kafka monitoring makes it relatively lightweight and easier to configure compared to general monitoring systems.

Official Links