:Use Managed Service for Prometheus to monitor self-managed Kafka clusters and ApsaraMQ for Kafka instances

Challenges of using a self-managed Prometheus service to monitor ApsaraMQ for Kafka instances and self-managed Kafka clusters

If you use a self-managed Prometheus service to monitor ApsaraMQ for Kafka instances and self-managed Kafka clusters, you may need to handle the following challenges:

1. To ensure security and facilitate organization management, it is likely that you deploy your business in separate virtual private clouds (VPCs). If you want to use a self-managed Prometheus service to monitor your business, you must deploy the Prometheus service in each VPC. This increases the deployment costs and O&M costs.

2. You must configure Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager in each independent self-managed monitoring system, which is complex and requires a long period of time to complete.

3. In some cases, the JMX agent of open-source Apache Kafka consumes a large amount of CPU resources. This causes some impacts on self-managed Kafka clusters.

4. You cannot use the self-managed Prometheus service to monitor ApsaraMQ for Kafka instances. As a result, you cannot monitor your messaging clusters in a one-stop and centralized manner.

5. If your self-managed Kafka cluster is deployed on an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance, the self-managed Prometheus service cannot flexibly define and capture targets based on ECS tags due to the lack of the service discovery mechanism. If you want to implement a similar mechanism, you must write code in Golang to call the POP API of Alibaba Cloud ECS to integrate the open source Prometheus service. Then, you must compile and package the code, and then deploy the open source Prometheus service. This process is complex and causes great trouble in version upgrades.

6. For the commonly used open-source Grafana dashboards, you cannot customize monitoring metrics based on the principles and best practices of Apache Kafka.

7. No alert template is available for monitoring Apache Kafka. You must configure alert rules on your own. This process requires manpower and has high technical requirements.

Comparison between a self-managed Prometheus service and Managed Service for Prometheus

The following table compares a self-managed Prometheus service with Managed Service for Prometheus in monitoring ApsaraMQ for Kafka instances and self-managed Kafka clusters.

Use Managed Service for Prometheus to monitor ApsaraMQ for Kafka

View ApsaraMQ for Kafka dashboards

ApsaraMQ for Kafka provides three monitoring dashboards for instances, groups, and topics. You can view data on the dashboards to understand the production and consumption of messages and quickly identify issues.

Instance dashboard

1. Log on to the ApsaraMQ for Kafka console. In the left-side navigation pane, click Instances.

2. Click the name of the ApsaraMQ for Kafka instance that you want to view. In the left-side navigation pane, click Prometheus Monitoring to view the monitoring data of the instance.

Consumer group dashboard

1. Log on to the ApsaraMQ for Kafka console. In the left-side navigation pane, click Instances.

2. Click the name of the ApsaraMQ for Kafka instance that you want to view. In the left-side navigation pane, click Groups. On the page that appears, click the ID of the group that you want to view and click the Prometheus Monitoring tab to view the monitoring data of the group.

Topic dashboard

1. Log on to the ApsaraMQ for Kafka console. In the left-side navigation pane, click Instances.

2. Click the name of the ApsaraMQ for Kafka instance that you want to view. In the left-side navigation pane, click Topics. On the page that appears, click the name of the topic that you want to view and click the Prometheus Monitoring tab to view the monitoring data of the topic.

Use Managed Service for Prometheus to configure alert rules for ApsaraMQ for Kafka

1. Log on to the Managed Service for Prometheus console.

2. In the left-side navigation pane, click Instances.

3. Click the name of the Prometheus instance instance that you want to manage to go to the Integration Center page.

4. Click the ApsaraMQ for Kafka card in the Installed section. In the panel that appears, click the Alerts tab to view Prometheus alerts of ApsaraMQ for Kafka. Managed Service for Prometheus provides key alert metrics for ApsaraMQ for Kafka instances, groups, and topics. You can add alert rules based on your business requirements. For more information, see Create an alert rule for a Prometheus instance.

Use Managed Service for Prometheus to monitor self-managed Kafka clusters

When you use Managed Service for Prometheus to monitor self-managed Kafka clusters, you must also focus on internal O&M metrics.

Deploy the Kafka application component for self-managed Kafka clusters

1. Log on to the Managed Service for Prometheus console.

2. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Integration Center, and click the Kafka card on the right.

3. Set the parameter values as prompted, and click OK. The following tables describe the key parameters.

   ACK

   Parameter	Description
   Pod Label Selector	The tag and tag value configured for a pod when a Kafka JMX agent is deployed. Managed Service for Prometheus uses this tag for service discovery. For more information, see How do I deploy and configure a Kafka JMX agent?
   Metric Collect Interval	The interval at which you want the service to collect monitoring data.

   

   ECS(VPC)

   Parameter	Description
   Kafka cluster name	The Kafka cluster name, which must be unique. If the name duplicates, the same metrics may be collected repeatedly, resulting in dashboard errors.
   Service address	The endpoint of the self-managed Kafka broker, which can be an IP address or a domain name system (DNS) address. Separate multiple broker addresses with commas (,) or semicolons (;).
   Enable SASL	Specifies whether to enable the Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) feature on the Apache Kafka broker.
   Enable TLS	Specifies whether to enable the Transport Layer Security (TLS) feature on the Apache Kafka broker.
   Metric collection interval (units/second)	The interval at which you want the service to collect monitoring data.

   

View the dashboards of self-managed Kafka clusters

1. Log on to the Managed Service for Prometheus console.

2. In the left-side navigation pane, click Instances.

3. Click the name of the Prometheus instance instance that you want to manage to go to the Integration Center page.

4. Click the Kafka card in the Installed section. In the panel that appears, click the Dashboards tab and click the diagram of the Grafana dashboard that you want to view.

   The dashboards of the Kafka application component display the following information:

   • The number of Kafka brokers.

   • The number of partitions in each topic.

   • The numbers of inbound messages, outbound messages, and accumulated messages in each topic.

   • The number of in-sync replicas (ISRs) in each topic.

Configure alert rules for self-managed Kafka clusters