Monitoring number of consumer for the Kafka topic - java

We are using Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring our Kafka cluster.
In our application, we use Kafka streams and there is a chance that Kafka stream getting stopped due to exception. We are logging the event setUnCaughtExceptionHandler but, we also need some kind of alerting when the stream stops.
What we currently have is, jmx_exporter running as a agent and exposes Kafka metrics through an endpoint and prometheus fetches the metrics from the endpoint.
We don't see any kind of metrics which gives the count of active consumers per topic. Are we missing something? Any suggestions on how to get the number of active consumers and send alerts when the consumer stops.

we had similar needs and added Kafka Consumer Lag per partition into Grafana, and also added alerts if lag is more than specified threshold (threshold should be different per each topic, depending on load, e.g. for some topics it could be 10, and for highly loaded - 100000). so if you have more that e.g. 1000 unprocessed messages, you will get alert.
you could add state listener for each kafka stream and in case stream is in error state, log error or send email:
kafkaStream.setStateListener((newState, oldState) -> {
log.info("Kafka stream state changed [{}] >>>>> [{}]", oldState, newState);
if (newState == KafkaStreams.State.ERROR || newState == KafkaStreams.State.PENDING_SHUTDOWN) {
log.error("Kafka Stream is in [{}] state. Application should be restarted", newState);
}
});
also you could add health check indicator (e.g. via REST endpoint or via spring-boot HealthIndicator) that provides info whether stream is running or not:
KafkaStreams.State streamState = kafkaStream.state();
state.isRunning();
I also haven't found any kafka streams metrics which provide info about active consumers or available connected partitions, but as for me it would be nice if kafka streams provide such data (and hope it will be available in future releases).

Related

How to avoid losing messages with Kafka streams

We have a streams application that consumes messages from a source topic, does some processing and forward the results to a destination topic.
The structure of the messages are controlled by some avro schemas.
When starting consuming messages if the schema is not cached yet the application will try to retrieve it from schema registry. If for whichever reason the schema registry is not available (say a network glitch) then the currently being processed message is lost because the default handler is something called LogAndContinueExceptionHandler.
o.a.k.s.e.LogAndContinueExceptionHandler : Exception caught during Deserialization, taskId: 1_5, topic: my.topic.v1, partition: 5, offset: 142768
org.apache.kafka.common.errors.SerializationException: Error retrieving Avro schema for id 62
Caused by: java.net.SocketTimeoutException: connect timed out
at java.base/java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method) ~[na:na]
...
o.a.k.s.p.internals.RecordDeserializer : stream-thread [my-app-StreamThread-3] task [1_5] Skipping record due to deserialization error. topic=[my.topic.v1] partition=[5] offset=[142768]
...
So my question is what would be the proper way of dealing with situations like described above and make sure you don't lose messages no matter what. Is there an out of the box LogAndRollbackExceptionHandler error handler or a way of implementing your own?
Thank you in advance for your inputs.
I've not worked a lot on Kafka, but when i did, i remember having issues such as the one you are describing in our system.
Let me tell you how we took care of our scenarios, maybe it would help you out too:
Scenario 1: If your messages are being lost at the publishing side (publisher --> kafka), you can configure Kafka acknowledgement setting according to your need, if you use spring cloud stream with kafka, the property is spring.cloud.stream.kafka.binder.required-acks
Possible values:
At most once (Ack=0)
Publisher does not care if Kafka acknowledges or not.
Send and forget
Data loss is possible
At least once (Ack=1)
If Kafka does not acknowledge, publisher resends message.
Possible duplication.
Acknowledgment is sent before message is copied to replicas.
Exactly once (Ack=all)
If Kafka does not acknowledge, publisher resends message.
However, if a message gets sent more than once to Kafka, there is no duplication.
Internal sequence number, used to decide if message has already been written on topic or not.
Min.insync.replicas property needs to be set to ensure what is the minimum number of replices that need to be synced before kafka acknowledges to the producer.
Scenario 2: If your data is being lost at the consumer side (kafka --> consumer), you can change the Auto Commit feature of Kafka according to your usage. This is the property if you are using Spring cloud stream spring.cloud.stream.kafka.bindings.input.consumer.AutoCommitOffset.
By default, AutoCommitOffset is true in kafka, and every message that is sent to the consumer is "committed" at Kafka's end, meaning it wont be sent again. However if you change AutoCommitOffset to false, you will have the power to poll the message from kafka in your code, and once you are done with your work, explicitly set commit to true to let kafka know that now you are done with the message.
If a message is not committed, kafka will keep resending it until it is.
Hope this helps you out, or atleast points you in the right direction.

GCP Pubsub high latency on low message/sec

I'm publishing Pubsub messages from AppEngine Flexible environment with the JAVA client library like this:
Publisher publisher = Publisher
.newBuilder(ProjectTopicName.of(Utils.getApplicationId(), "test-topic"))
.setBatchingSettings(
BatchingSettings.newBuilder()
.setIsEnabled(false)
.build())
.build();
publisher.publish(PubsubMessage.newBuilder()
.setData(ByteString.copyFromUtf8(message))
.putAttributes("timestamp", String.valueOf(System.currentTimeMillis()))
.build());
I'm subscribing to the topic in Dataflow and logging how long it takes for the message to reach Dataflow from AppEngine flexible
pipeline
.apply(PubsubIO.readMessagesWithAttributes().fromSubscription(Utils.buildPubsubSubscription(Constants.PROJECT_NAME, "test-topic")))
.apply(ParDo.of(new DoFn<PubsubMessage, PubsubMessage>() {
#ProcessElement
public void processElement(ProcessContext c) {
long timestamp = System.currentTimeMillis() - Long.parseLong(c.element().getAttribute("timestamp"));
System.out.println("Time: " + timestamp);
}
}));
pipeline.run();
When I'm publishing messages at the rate of a few messages per second then the logs show that the time needed for the message to reach Dataflow is between 100ms and 1.5 seconds.
But when the rate is about 100 messages per second then the time is constantly between 100ms - 200ms, which seems totally adequate.
Can someone explain this behavior. It seems as turning off the publisher batching does not work.
Pub/Sub is designed for high throughput messages for both Subscription cases.
Pull subscription works best when there's large volume of messages, it's the kind of subscription you would use when throughput of message processing is your priority. Specially note that synchronous pull doesn't handle messages as soon as they are published, and can choose to pull and handle a fixed number of messages (more messages, more pulls). A better option would be to use asynchronous pull, which uses a long running message listener and acknowledges one message at a time [1].
On the other hand, Push subscription uses a slow-start algorithm: The number of messages sent is doubled with each successful delivery until it reaches its constraints (more messages, more -and faster- deliveries).
[1] https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/docs/pull#asynchronous-pull

How can I send large messages with Kafka (over 15MB)?

I send String-messages to Kafka V. 0.8 with the Java Producer API.
If the message size is about 15 MB I get a MessageSizeTooLargeException.
I have tried to set message.max.bytesto 40 MB, but I still get the exception. Small messages worked without problems.
(The exception appear in the producer, I don't have a consumer in this application.)
What can I do to get rid of this exception?
My example producer config
private ProducerConfig kafkaConfig() {
Properties props = new Properties();
props.put("metadata.broker.list", BROKERS);
props.put("serializer.class", "kafka.serializer.StringEncoder");
props.put("request.required.acks", "1");
props.put("message.max.bytes", "" + 1024 * 1024 * 40);
return new ProducerConfig(props);
}
Error-Log:
4709 [main] WARN kafka.producer.async.DefaultEventHandler - Produce request with correlation id 214 failed due to [datasift,0]: kafka.common.MessageSizeTooLargeException
4869 [main] WARN kafka.producer.async.DefaultEventHandler - Produce request with correlation id 217 failed due to [datasift,0]: kafka.common.MessageSizeTooLargeException
5035 [main] WARN kafka.producer.async.DefaultEventHandler - Produce request with correlation id 220 failed due to [datasift,0]: kafka.common.MessageSizeTooLargeException
5198 [main] WARN kafka.producer.async.DefaultEventHandler - Produce request with correlation id 223 failed due to [datasift,0]: kafka.common.MessageSizeTooLargeException
5305 [main] ERROR kafka.producer.async.DefaultEventHandler - Failed to send requests for topics datasift with correlation ids in [213,224]
kafka.common.FailedToSendMessageException: Failed to send messages after 3 tries.
at kafka.producer.async.DefaultEventHandler.handle(Unknown Source)
at kafka.producer.Producer.send(Unknown Source)
at kafka.javaapi.producer.Producer.send(Unknown Source)
You need to adjust three (or four) properties:
Consumer side:fetch.message.max.bytes - this will determine the largest size of a message that can be fetched by the consumer.
Broker side: replica.fetch.max.bytes - this will allow for the replicas in the brokers to send messages within the cluster and make sure the messages are replicated correctly. If this is too small, then the message will never be replicated, and therefore, the consumer will never see the message because the message will never be committed (fully replicated).
Broker side: message.max.bytes - this is the largest size of the message that can be received by the broker from a producer.
Broker side (per topic): max.message.bytes - this is the largest size of the message the broker will allow to be appended to the topic. This size is validated pre-compression. (Defaults to broker's message.max.bytes.)
I found out the hard way about number 2 - you don't get ANY exceptions, messages, or warnings from Kafka, so be sure to consider this when you are sending large messages.
Minor changes required for Kafka 0.10 and the new consumer compared to laughing_man's answer:
Broker: No changes, you still need to increase properties message.max.bytes and replica.fetch.max.bytes. message.max.bytes has to be equal or smaller(*) than replica.fetch.max.bytes.
Producer: Increase max.request.size to send the larger message.
Consumer: Increase max.partition.fetch.bytes to receive larger messages.
(*) Read the comments to learn more about message.max.bytes<=replica.fetch.max.bytes
The answer from #laughing_man is quite accurate. But still, I wanted to give a recommendation which I learned from Kafka expert Stephane Maarek. We actively applied this solution in our live systems.
Kafka isn’t meant to handle large messages.
Your API should use cloud storage (for example, AWS S3) and simply push a reference to S3 to Kafka or any other message broker. You'll need to find a place to save your data, whether it can be a network drive or something else entirely, but it shouldn't be a message broker.
If you don't want to proceed with the recommended and reliable solution above,
The message max size is 1MB (the setting in your brokers is called message.max.bytes) Apache Kafka. If you really needed it badly, you could increase that size and make sure to increase the network buffers for your producers and consumers.
And if you really care about splitting your message, make sure each message split has the exact same key so that it gets pushed to the same partition, and your message content should report a “part id” so that your consumer can fully reconstruct the message.
If the message is text-based try to compress the data, which may reduce the data size, but not magically.
Again, you have to use an external system to store that data and just push an external reference to Kafka. That is a very common architecture and one you should go with and widely accepted.
Keep that in mind Kafka works best only if the messages are huge in amount but not in size.
Source: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-send-Large-messages-80-MB-in-Kafka
The idea is to have equal size of message being sent from Kafka Producer to Kafka Broker and then received by Kafka Consumer i.e.
Kafka producer --> Kafka Broker --> Kafka Consumer
Suppose if the requirement is to send 15MB of message, then the Producer, the Broker and the Consumer, all three, needs to be in sync.
Kafka Producer sends 15 MB --> Kafka Broker Allows/Stores 15 MB --> Kafka Consumer receives 15 MB
The setting therefore should be:
a) on Broker:
message.max.bytes=15728640
replica.fetch.max.bytes=15728640
b) on Consumer:
fetch.message.max.bytes=15728640
You need to override the following properties:
Broker Configs($KAFKA_HOME/config/server.properties)
replica.fetch.max.bytes
message.max.bytes
Consumer Configs($KAFKA_HOME/config/consumer.properties)
This step didn't work for me. I add it to the consumer app and it was working fine
fetch.message.max.bytes
Restart the server.
look at this documentation for more info:
http://kafka.apache.org/08/configuration.html
I think, most of the answers here are kind of outdated or not entirely complete.
To refer on the answer of Sacha Vetter (with the update for Kafka 0.10), I'd like to provide some additional Information and links to the official documentation.
Producer Configuration:
max.request.size (Link) has to be increased for files bigger than 1 MB, otherwise they are rejected
Broker/Topic configuration:
message.max.bytes (Link) may be set, if one like to increase the message size on broker level. But, from the documentation: "This can be set per topic with the topic level max.message.bytes config."
max.message.bytes (Link) may be increased, if only one topic should be able to accept lager files. The broker configuration must not be changed.
I'd always prefer a topic-restricted configuration, due to the fact, that I can configure the topic by myself as a client for the Kafka cluster (e.g. with the admin client). I may not have any influence on the broker configuration itself.
In the answers from above, some more configurations are mentioned as necessary:
replica.fetch.max.bytes (Link) (Broker config)
From the documentation: "This is not an absolute maximum, if the first record batch in the first non-empty partition of the fetch is larger than this value, the record batch will still be returned to ensure that progress can be made."
max.partition.fetch.bytes (Link) (Consumer config)
From the documentation: "Records are fetched in batches by the consumer. If the first record batch in the first non-empty partition of the fetch is larger than this limit, the batch will still be returned to ensure that the consumer can make progress."
fetch.max.bytes (Link) (Consumer config; not mentioned above, but same category)
From the documentation: "Records are fetched in batches by the consumer, and if the first record batch in the first non-empty partition of the fetch is larger than this value, the record batch will still be returned to ensure that the consumer can make progress."
Conclusion: The configurations regarding fetching messages are not necessary to change for processing messages, lager than the default values of these configuration (had this tested in a small setup). Probably, the consumer may always get batches of size 1. However, two of the configurations from the first block has to be set, as mentioned in the answers before.
This clarification should not tell anything about performance and should not be a recommendation to set or not to set these configuration. The best values has to be evaluated individually depending on the concrete planned throughput and data structure.
One key thing to remember that message.max.bytes attribute must be in sync with the consumer's fetch.message.max.bytes property. the fetch size must be at least as large as the maximum message size otherwise there could be situation where producers can send messages larger than the consumer can consume/fetch. It might worth taking a look at it.
Which version of Kafka you are using? Also provide some more details trace that you are getting. is there some thing like ... payload size of xxxx larger
than 1000000 coming up in the log?
For people using landoop kafka:
You can pass the config values in the environment variables like:
docker run -d --rm -p 2181:2181 -p 3030:3030 -p 8081-8083:8081-8083 -p 9581-9585:9581-9585 -p 9092:9092
-e KAFKA_TOPIC_MAX_MESSAGE_BYTES=15728640 -e KAFKA_REPLICA_FETCH_MAX_BYTES=15728640 landoop/fast-data-dev:latest `
This sets topic.max.message.bytes and replica.fetch.max.bytes on the broker.
And if you're using rdkafka then pass the message.max.bytes in the producer config like:
const producer = new Kafka.Producer({
'metadata.broker.list': 'localhost:9092',
'message.max.bytes': '15728640',
'dr_cb': true
});
Similarly, for the consumer,
const kafkaConf = {
"group.id": "librd-test",
"fetch.message.max.bytes":"15728640",
... .. }
Here is how I achieved successfully sending data up to 100mb using kafka-python==2.0.2:
Broker:
consumer = KafkaConsumer(
...
max_partition_fetch_bytes=max_bytes,
fetch_max_bytes=max_bytes,
)
Producer (See final solution at the end):
producer = KafkaProducer(
...
max_request_size=KafkaSettings.MAX_BYTES,
)
Then:
producer.send(topic, value=data).get()
After sending data like this, the following exception appeared:
MessageSizeTooLargeError: The message is n bytes when serialized which is larger than the total memory buffer you have configured with the buffer_memory configuration.
Finally I increased buffer_memory (default 32mb) to receive the message on the other end.
producer = KafkaProducer(
...
max_request_size=KafkaSettings.MAX_BYTES,
buffer_memory=KafkaSettings.MAX_BYTES * 3,
)

Does Spring Integration RabbitTemplate publish to persistent queue by default?

I have a scheduled task that performs the following bit of code:
try {
rabbitTemplate.convertAndSend("TEST");
if (!isOn()) {
turnOn();
}
}
catch (AmqpException e) {
if (isOn()) {
turnOff();
}
}
Everything works just fine. It sends this message to the default "AMQP default" exchange. I do not have a consumer on the other end to consume these messages because I am just ensuring that the server is still alive. Will these messages accumulate over time and cause a memory leak?
Thanks!
K
Do you have a RabbitMQ user interface?
You should be able to see the queues that are being created and whether they are persistent or not. Last time I checked, the default behaviour of Spring AMQP is to create persistent queues.
Have a look at the RabbitMQ Management Plugin: http://www.rabbitmq.com/management.html
Using the RabbitMQ Management Plugin, you can also consume messages that you've published via your code.
Regarding what happens with the messages, they will just pile up and pile up until RabbitMQ hits its limits, then it will no longer accept messages until you purge the queue or consume those messages. With the default RabbitMQ settings, I was able to send about 4 million simple text messages to the queue before it started blocking.

RabbitMQ - Get total count of messages enqueued

I have a Java client which monitors RabbitMQ queue. I am able to get the count of messages currently in queue with this code
#Resource
RabbitAdmin rabbitAdmin;
..........
DeclareOk declareOk = rabbitAdmin.getRabbitTemplate().execute(new ChannelCallback<DeclareOk>() {
public DeclareOk doInRabbit(Channel channel) throws Exception {
return channel.queueDeclarePassive("test.pending");
}
});
return declareOk.getMessageCount();
I want to get some more additional details like -
Message body of currently enqueued items.
Total number of messages that was enqueued in the queue since the queue was created.
Is there any way to retrieve these data in Java client?
With AMQP protocol (including RabbitMQ implementation) you can't get such info with 100% guarantee.
The closest number to messages count is messages count returned with queue.declare-ok (AMQP.Queue.DeclareOk in java AMQP client library).
Whilst messages count you receive with queue.declare-ok may match exact messages number enqueues, you can't rely on it as it doesn't count messages which waiting acknowledges or published to queue during transaction but not committed yet.
It really depends what kind of precission do you need.
As to enqueued messages body, you may want to manually extract all messages in queue, view their body and put them back to queue. This is the only way to do what you want.
You can get some information about messages count with Management Plugin, RabbitMQ Management HTTP API and rabbitmqctl util (see list_queues, list_channels).
You can't get total published messages count since queue was created and I think nobody implement such stats while it useless (FYI, with messages flow in average 10k per second you will not even reach uint64 in a few thousand years).
AMQP.Queue.DeclareOk dok = channel.queueDeclare(QUEUE_NAME, true, false, false, queueArgs);
dok.getMessageCount();
To access queue details via http api,
http://public-domain-name:15672/api/queues/%2f/queue_name
To access queue details via command from localhost cli promt,
curl -i -u guest_uname:guest_password http://localhost:15672/api/queues/%2f/queue_name
Where,
%2f is default vhost "/"

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