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Add Kafka as a Receiver

You can use Elasticsearch, Kafka and Fluentd as log receivers in KubeSphere. This tutorial demonstrates:

Deploy strimzi-kafka-operator and then create a Kafka cluster and a Kafka topic by creating Kafka and KafkaTopic CRDs.
Add Kafka as a log receiver to receive logs sent from Fluent Bit.
Verify whether the Kafka cluster is receiving logs using Kafkacat.

Prerequisites

You need a user granted a role including the permission of Cluster Management. For example, you can log in to the console as admin directly or create a new role with the permission and assign it to a user.
Before adding a log receiver, you need to enable any of the logging, events or auditing components. For more information, see Enable Pluggable Components. logging is enabled as an example in this tutorial.

Step 1: Create a Kafka Cluster and a Kafka Topic

You can use strimzi-kafka-operator to create a Kafka cluster and a Kafka topic. If you already have a Kafka cluster, you can start from the next step.

Install strimzi-kafka-operator in the default namespace:

helm repo add strimzi https://strimzi.io/charts/

helm install --name kafka-operator -n default strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator

Create a Kafka cluster and a Kafka topic in the default namespace by running the following commands. The commands create Kafka and Zookeeper clusters with storage type ephemeral which is emptyDir for demonstration purposes. For other storage types in a production environment, refer to kafka-persistent.

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta1
kind: Kafka
metadata:
  name: my-cluster
  namespace: default
spec:
  kafka:
    version: 2.5.0
    replicas: 3
    listeners:
      plain: {}
      tls: {}
    config:
      offsets.topic.replication.factor: 3
      transaction.state.log.replication.factor: 3
      transaction.state.log.min.isr: 2
      log.message.format.version: '2.5'
    storage:
      type: ephemeral
  zookeeper:
    replicas: 3
    storage:
      type: ephemeral
  entityOperator:
    topicOperator: {}
    userOperator: {}
---
apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta1
kind: KafkaTopic
metadata:
  name: my-topic
  namespace: default
  labels:
    strimzi.io/cluster: my-cluster
spec:
  partitions: 3
  replicas: 3
  config:
    retention.ms: 7200000
    segment.bytes: 1073741824
EOF

Run the following command to check Pod status and wait for Kafka and Zookeeper are all up and running.

$ kubectl -n default get pod 
NAME                                         READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
my-cluster-entity-operator-f977bf457-s7ns2   3/3     Running   0          69m
my-cluster-kafka-0                           2/2     Running   0          69m
my-cluster-kafka-1                           2/2     Running   0          69m
my-cluster-kafka-2                           2/2     Running   0          69m
my-cluster-zookeeper-0                       1/1     Running   0          71m
my-cluster-zookeeper-1                       1/1     Running   1          71m
my-cluster-zookeeper-2                       1/1     Running   1          71m
strimzi-cluster-operator-7d6cd6bdf7-9cf6t    1/1     Running   0          104m

Run the following command to check the metadata of the Kafka cluster:

kafkacat -L -b my-cluster-kafka-0.my-cluster-kafka-brokers.default.svc:9092,my-cluster-kafka-1.my-cluster-kafka-brokers.default.svc:9092,my-cluster-kafka-2.my-cluster-kafka-brokers.default.svc:9092

Step 2: Add Kafka as a Log Receiver

Log in to KubeSphere as admin. Click Platform in the upper-left corner and select Cluster Management.

Note

If you have enabled the multi-cluster feature, you can select a specific cluster.
On the Cluster Management page, go to Log Receivers in Cluster Settings.

Click Add Log Receiver and select Kafka. Enter the Kafka service address and port number, and then click OK to continue.

Service Address	Port Number
my-cluster-kafka-0.my-cluster-kafka-brokers.default.svc	9092
my-cluster-kafka-1.my-cluster-kafka-brokers.default.svc	9092
my-cluster-kafka-2.my-cluster-kafka-brokers.default.svc	9092

Run the following commands to verify whether the Kafka cluster is receiving logs sent from Fluent Bit:

# Start a util container
kubectl run --rm utils -it --generator=run-pod/v1 --image arunvelsriram/utils bash
# Install Kafkacat in the util container
apt-get install kafkacat
# Run the following command to consume log messages from kafka topic: my-topic
kafkacat -C -b my-cluster-kafka-0.my-cluster-kafka-brokers.default.svc:9092,my-cluster-kafka-1.my-cluster-kafka-brokers.default.svc:9092,my-cluster-kafka-2.my-cluster-kafka-brokers.default.svc:9092 -t my-topic

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