confluentinc inlined-refs — consumer lag dashboarding
Step 1 — pick the exporter
We support two exporters. Read the comparison below before recommending.
Exporter comparison (from references/exporters.md)
kafka-exporter (Danielqsj)
Pros: lightweight, single binary, exposes per-group lag directly.
Cons: stateful (consumes __consumer_offsets internally), can lag on large clusters.
Best for: clusters < 100 brokers, < 1000 consumer groups.
Config snippet:
kafka-exporter \
--kafka.server=localhost:9092 \
--kafka.version=3.5.0 \
--web.listen-address=:9308
Confluent Control Center
Pros: official, covers full Confluent Platform metrics. Cons: paid licensing, heavier footprint.
Best for: enterprise Confluent Platform users.
Step 2 — Grafana dashboard
Use Grafana dashboard 7589 for kafka-exporter. Filter by consumer group, plot kafka_consumergroup_lag over a 5-minute window.
Step 3 — alerts
Set lag > 10,000 messages for 5 minutes as the default alert. Adjust per topic SLA.