Control Center for Confluent Platform¶

Confluent Control Center is a web-based tool for managing and monitoring Apache Kafka® in Confluent Platform. Control Center provides a user interface that enables you to get a quick overview of cluster health, observe and control messages, topics, and Schema Registry, and to develop and run ksqlDB queries.

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Install and access¶

Install Control Center with a supported version of Confluent Platform. For details about install and configuration, see Confluent Control Center Installation and Control Center Configuration Reference for Confluent Platform.

To access Control Center on the default host and port, go to: http://localhost:9021/

Monitoring services¶

Control Center monitors Confluent Platform by collecting metrics about brokers, topics, and consumer group lag.

For monitoring Connect, Replicator, and ksqlDB clusters and underlying resources, metrics aren’t collected. Control Center requests information from these services to display status.

The following image shows an example of the monitoring capabilities of Control Center.

Management services¶

To provide management services, Control Center acts as a client that redirects requests to their appropriate servers. For example, requests to update broker settings or to create a new topic will be redirected to Kafka; requests to create a new connector will be redirected to Kafka Connect.

Reduced infrastructure mode¶

To conserve resources, you can run Control Center in Reduced infrastructure mode. You don’t get any metrics or monitoring data in Reduced infrastructure mode. For more information, see Confluent Control Center Installation.

Configure Control Center to run in Reduced infrastructure mode with the mode property. If you you don’t explicitly set Reduced infrastructure mode, you get metrics and monitoring.

Management services are provided in Reduced infrastructure mode.

Control Center features¶

Control Center includes the following pages where you can drill down to view data and configure features in your Kafka environment. The following table lists Control Center pages and what they display depending on the mode for Confluent Control Center.

Control Center feature	Normal mode	Reduced infrastructure mode
Clusters overview	View healthy and unhealthy clusters at a glance and search for a cluster being managed by Control Center. Click on a cluster tile to drill into views of critical metrics and connected services for that cluster.	View healthy and unhealthy clusters, the number of topics, and connected services.
Brokers overview	View broker partitioning and replication status, which broker is the active controller, and broker metrics like throughput and more.	Same as Normal mode. To access the Brokers page in Reduced infrastructure mode, Use the Brokers navigation menu entry.
Topics	Add and edit topics, view production and consumption metrics for a topic. Browse, create, and download messages, and manage Schema Registry for topics.	Add and edit topics. Browse, create, download messages, and manage Schema Registry for topics. Note that internal topics are not created in Reduced infrastructure mode.
Connect	Manage, monitor, and configure connectors with Kafka Connect, the toolkit for connecting external systems to Kafka.	Same as Normal mode.
ksqlDB	Develop applications against ksqlDB, the streaming SQL engine for Kafka. Use the ksqlDB page in Control Center to: run, view, and terminate SQL queries; browse and download messages from query results; add, describe, and drop streams and tables; and view schemas of available streams and tables in a cluster.	Same as Normal mode.
Consumers	View the consumer groups associated with a selected Kafka cluster, including the number of consumers per group, the number of topics being consumed, and consumer lag across all relevant topics. The Consumers feature also contains the redesigned streams monitoring page.	Same as Normal mode.
Replicators	Monitor and configure replicated topics and create replica topics that preserve topic configuration in the source cluster.	Configure replicated topics and create replica topics that preserve topic configuration in the source cluster.
Cluster Settings	View and edit cluster properties and broker configurations.	Same as Normal mode.
Alerts	Use Alerts to define the trigger criteria for anomalous events that occur during data monitoring and to trigger an alert when those events occur. Set triggers, actions, and view alert history across all of your Control Center clusters.	Use Alerts to define a limited set of triggers that do not rely on monitoring and/or metrics data (Cluster down, consumer lag and consumer lead).

Control Center security¶

Control Center offers several security options for authentication and authorization to help you secure your deployment. For more information, see the following topics: