Anup Shirolkar shows us a way to use JMeter to generate load for Apache Kafka clusters:
The Anomalia Machina is going to require (at least!) one more thing as stated in the intro, loading with lots of data! Kafka is a log aggregation system and operates on a publish-subscribe mechanism. The Kafka cluster in Anomalia Machina will be accumulating a lot of events which are to be processed to discover anomalies. The exact sequence of processing is still being prototyped at this point in time, but there is a solid requirement of a tool/mechanism to load the Kafka cluster with lots of data in a hurry.
The requirements pointed me in direction of looking for ‘Kafka Load Testing’. Firstly thinking of load testing, one tool comes to mind which is used very widely for load testing of Java based systems: ‘Jmeter’. Jmeter has rich toolset to perform various types of testing. It also comes with many advantages viz. Open source, easy to use, platform independent, distributed testing etc. I can use Jmeter and test its ability to perform cluster loading.
Read on for the demonstration.