Zoe — New Kafka client in town

Yet another command-line Kafka tool but with good features. If you are a fan of Command-line tools then definitely should explore it.

Zoe is a command-line interface open-sourced by Adventia. So, what I am posting about one more Kafka Tool while well know Kafkacat is out there for some time. There are some features in specific Filtering, Querying and managing environments as well ability to predefine expressions to filter or view data is where Zoe caught my attention. Also, the ability to view data in different formats like a table, JSON, and raw.

Zoe - The Kafka Companion

Install

There are several ways you can install zoe CLI.

Run this command to install using homebrew

brew install adevinta/homebrew-zoe/zoe

Verify installation using

zoe --help

Config

Initialize configuration

zoe config init

This will create a default configuration file in users home directory ~/.zoe/config/default.yml

Two ways to organize configuration for multiple environments.

1. Having all different environment cluster information in default.yml
2. Separate the YAML file for each environment configuration to keep it separate.

Sample Configuration file representing multiple clusters

With the second approach you can organize your files as shown below:

~/.zoe/config
├── dev.yml
├── staging.yml
└── prod.yml

To reference specific cluster and Query topic data you can simply use -c local and pass a reference to cluster name according to YAML file.

OR

You could also use - - env staging attribute to reference your environment name

OR

Environment Variable export ZOE_ENV=pro

Output formats

Zoe supports multiple output formats to visualize data. At a time table format is very useful when troubleshooting data and using Query and Filter modes.

Use one of the formats with -o as shown below

-o raw|json|table

Topics, Consumer Groups, and Schema examples

Topics

List Topics

zoe -c local -o table topics list

Describe Topic

zoe -c local -o table topics describe "demo.topic"

Query specific data points from Message in particular Topic

zoe -o table -v --cluster local topics consume "demo.topic" --query '{id: itemID}'

Filter data by property in message

zoe -o table -v --cluster local topics consume "demo.topic" --filter "itemID == '5550a0be-cae9-4bfc-a1d9-1f9375fa6b42'"

Consumer Groups

List Consumer Groups

zoe -o table -v -c local groups list

View Offsets of Consumer Group

zoe -o table -v -c local groups offsets "DemoGroupId"

Describe Consumer Group

zoe -o table -v -c local groups describe "DemoGroupId"

View Members of Consumer Group

zoe -o table -v -c local groups members "DemoGroupId"

Schema

List Schema

zoe -c local schemas list

For some Advance usage check out Documentation here

Registered expressions

Conclusion

I rate Zoe 3.5 over Kafkacat 4.5. Overall zoe shines for certain features over Kafkacat. However, since it is less than a couple of weeks into the first release some performance improvements overtime will be win while working with a large data set.

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