Setting Data in Motion: The Definitive Guide to Adopting Confluent

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.

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.