Introducing FranzView
Patrick Reid | Chris Dunleavy | Ryan Hastie | Jonathan Haviv | Rachelle Maiorca
As the age of giant monolithic websites comes to an end and is replaced with microservices, a significant number of businesses, large and small, are using Apache Kafka to manage their event pipeline. While there are a few open source Kafka management tools, they generally have a very opinionated structure. They can only be used in the way they were created, which leads to a lot of developers employing multiple tools to meet their needs. Another problem we found is that most tools are written in Java, making them largely inaccessible to JavaScript developers.
That is why we decided to create FranzView; a friendly open source developer tool (with a swanky bowler hat) that makes it easy to manage your Kafka cluster and monitor its health and performance. What makes FranzView stand out? It was written with JavaScript developers in mind.
Features of FranzView
FranzView is designed for small to medium projects with minimal set up time. Out of the box, it gives developers the ability to easily manage their Kafka cluster — no shell commands required. Some of the management tools include:
- Adding and configuring a new topic
- Deleting a topic
- Partition reassignment
FranzView also provides powerful metric monitoring so that you can easily see the health of your various Kafka clusters. The dashboard gives you a broad overview of important metrics with intuitive links to more specific data. Some of the key metrics we track are:
- Under Min ISR — an increase in this metric is a red flag that lets you know that your partition followers are not replicating their partition leader
- Under replicated partitions — a developer can set the number of partition replicas per topic, ensuring data availability and durability; when this metric drops below the specified number it usually means that a broker may have gone offline or fallen behind
- Offline partition count — a partition leader may go offline due to a server failure, making the data on that broker unavailable; an increase in this metric indicates the need to assign a new leader to prevent interruptions
Other metrics include:
- CPU Usage
- JVM Memory Usage
- Bytes In Per Sec
- Bytes Out Per Sec
- Messages In Per Sec
- Active Controller Count
- and more…
Coming soon…
In the near future FranzView will allow you to easily add additional metrics that you wish to monitor, or remove metrics that are cluttering your view. We also will be adding a bug tracking feature that will send you an alert if a metric throws a red flag. Visit our GitHub repo for a more detailed roadmap of planned features. We are excited to continue expanding FranzView’s functionality and look forward to seeing what the community will contribute.
Conclusion
Our vision is that FranzView, with its sleek, uncluttered UI, will be the only open source Kafka management and data monitoring tool that a developer will ever need. Its quick setup and simple deployment allows a developer to start using it right away. Since FranzView is a one stop shop, it doesn’t have the steep learning curve of using multiple tools, saving time and energy.
You can get started using FranzView today by visiting our Github repo here! You can also visit our official website here. If there are any additional features that you’d like to see or have any suggestions to improve the FranzView experience, please feel free to open an issue and our team will work with you to get it implemented!
FranzView is brought to you by:
Chris Dunleavy || LinkedIn
Ryan Hastie || LinkedIn
Jonathan Haviv || LinkedIn
Rachelle Maiorca || LinkedIn
Patrick Reid || LinkedIn
