Kafka on Abhishek Walia

Chitragupta

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Hindu tradition, Chitragupta is the deity who maintains a complete record of every being’s actions. The divine accountant. Fitting name for a system that tracks exactly who used what and how much it cost.

CCloud Chargeback Helper

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When multiple teams share a Confluent Cloud environment but a single CoE team manages everything, the billing question comes up fast: who’s actually using what, and how much does it cost?

JMX Monitoring Stacks

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Most monitoring setups for Kafka require long and lengthy parsing configurations to get JMX metrics into your telemetry system. This project standardizes that pipeline across Prometheus/Grafana, New Relic, Elastic/Kibana, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry.

Kafka Broker Sizing Calculator

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Starting a Kafka cluster is easy. Sizing it correctly is where things get interesting. Most teams start with 3 brokers because that’s the minimum, and then hope it’s enough. This tool replaces the hope with math.

Topic-Level Kafka Cost Attribution with Prometheus

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Which topic is costing us?” is the question every platform team gets, and nobody can answer it cleanly. SaaS providers bill you at the cluster level. Your finance team wants a line item per team. Your product managers want to know if their pipeline is the expensive one. You have a Kafka cluster, a bill, and no bridge between them.

From 'Where's My Money?' to 'Here's Your Bill': Demystifying Kafka Chargebacks and Showbacks

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Presented at Confluent Current 2025 in New Orleans.

Cloud billing for Kafka is opaque by default. You get one invoice, shared across every team, with no clear way to tell who’s driving costs. This talk walks through how to go from that to transparent, identity-level cost attribution, covering the tooling, the data model, and the organizational patterns that make chargebacks and showbacks actually work.

Observability-First Kafka: Engineering Visibility at Scale

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Presented at Conf42 Observability 2025.

Kafka doesn’t fail cleanly. It stalls, lags, and misfires beneath the surface. This talk cuts through the noise to show what signals actually matter, how to catch issues early, and how to make Kafka observable without drowning in metrics.

Batch Processing vs. Real-Time Stream Processing with Apache Flink

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Featured on Confluent’s Life Is But A Stream podcast, February 2025.

The batch vs. streaming question comes up constantly with teams evaluating Kafka. This episode breaks down the architectural trade-offs, when each approach makes sense, and what the transition from batch to real-time actually looks like in practice.

Setting Data in Motion: The Definitive Guide to Adopting Confluent

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Co-author and section reviewer.

A comprehensive adoption guide for technical executives, platform owners, and project managers evaluating or rolling out Confluent. Covers architecture patterns, operational considerations, and the organizational side of moving to event-driven platforms.

Monitor Kafka Clusters with Prometheus, Grafana, and Confluent

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Published on the Confluent Blog, March 2021.

Self-managing a Kafka cluster means wiring up your own monitoring. This post walks through how to export JMX data from Confluent clusters into Prometheus and Grafana with minimal setup. It became the reference blog series for connecting Confluent ecosystems to Prometheus-based monitoring stacks.