Apache Kafka extension

• Latest Dynatrace
• Extension
• Published Oct 27, 2025

Automatic and intelligent observability with trace and metric insights.

1 of 8Get an overview of your Kafka monitoring using New Dashboards, which are bundled with the extension upon activation.

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Overview

Seamless end-to-end traces for connected producer and consumer clients allow you to diagnose anomalies and pinpoint the root cause of the broken code before your customers are affected.

Comprehensive metrics give you insight into your Kafka servers with health and performance metrics for brokers, topics, producers, and consumers. Events point you to critical anomalies, reducing the mean repair time.

Use cases

Requirements

Activation and setup

Messaging clients (applications)

To get trace insight:

To get log insight:

Messaging servers (brokers)

Prerequisites:

To get metric insight:

Details

This extension package contains:

With the Kafka extension, you can get additional insight into your Kafka server with metrics for brokers, topics, producers, consumers, and more. The extension also provides alerts for the most critical metrics. It creates a custom topology and entities for brokers, topics, producers, and consumers. It provides a dashboard for easier access and configuration of the extension and its entities.

The extension will gather different metrics depending on if it's monitoring a Kafka broker, producer or consumer. Make sure to activate the extension on all of them to get all metrics.

The extension has one single variable called Topic name filter, which can be used to filter the topics that will be monitored by this extension. This filter will be applied to every metric with a topic dimension. It uses the ObjectName java notation, meaning it accepts wildcards such as * and ?.

Select Add to environment to get started.

Licensing and cost

This extension queries for data every minute. Once data is produced, this is ingested as metric datapoints and subject to license consumption. Whether you are on a Classic or DPS license model, the measurement unit for metric ingestion is based on metric datapoints.

To estimate the amount of metric datapoints produced by your extension configuration, use the following list which gives you a number of metrics per feature set and a multiplier value depending on which entity the metric is split by. Add all of these up and you will have the number of datapoints produced every minute.

For example, a monitoring configuration where all feature sets are enabled, containing 1 Kafka Broker, 1 Kafka Producer, and 1 Kafka Consumer produces 64 metric datapoints per minute

By extrapolation, it will ingest:

Included Metrics per host unit Because JMX Extensions run on OneAgent-monitored hosts, are subject to included metrics per host unit.

Please refer to the documentation depending on licensing type:

Feature sets

When activating your extension using monitoring configuration, you can limit monitoring to one of the feature sets. To work properly the extension has to collect at least one metric after the activation.

In highly segmented networks, feature sets can reflect the segments of your environment. Then, when you create a monitoring configuration, you can select a feature set and a corresponding ActiveGate group that can connect to this particular segment.

All metrics that aren't categorized into any feature set are considered to be the default and are always reported.

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot this extension, use the guide(s) in the Dynatrace Community.

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Automatic and intelligent observability with trace and metric insights.