All Things Hadoop

Apache Kafka has been used for some time now by organizations to consume not only all of the data within its infrastructure from an application perspective but also the server statistics of the running applications and infrastructure.  Apache Kafka is great for this.

Coda Hale’s metrics’s has become a leading way to instrument your JVM applications capturing what the application is doing and reporting it to different servers like Graphite, Ganglia, Riemann and other systems.  The main problem with this is the tight coupling between your application (and infrastructure) metrics with how you are charting, trending and alerting on them.  Now lets insert Apache Kafka to-do the decoupling which it does best.

The systems sending data and the systems reading the data become decoupled through the Kafka brokers.

Now, once this decoupling happens it allows us to plug in new systems (producers) to send metrics and then have multiple different systems consuming them.  This means that not only can you monitor and alert on the metrics but also (and at the same time) do real time analysis or analysis over the larger dataset consumed off somewhere else.

So, how does this all work? Well, we created a Metrics reporter https://github.com/stealthly/metrics-kafka that you can use within your own applications and any application supporting Coda Hale’s metrics but now reporting to a Kafka topic.  We will be creating more producers (such as scrapping cpu, mem, disk, etc) and adding them to this project.  To use this setup a Metrics reporter like you would normally but do so like this:

import ly.stealth.kafka.metrics.KafkaReporter
val producer = KafkaReporter.builder(registry, kafkaConnection, topic).build()
producer.report()

git clone https://github.com/stealthly/metrics-kafka.git
cd metrics-kafka
vagrant up

./gradlew test