According to Burrow’s GitHub page: Burrow is a Kafka monitoring tool that keeps track of consumer lag. It does not provide any user interface to monitor. It provides several HTTP request endpoints to get information about Kafka clusters and consumer groups. Burrow also has a notifier system that can notify you (via email or at an HTTP endpoint) if a consumer group has met certain criteria.
Burrow is designed in a modular way that separates the work done into multiple subsystems. Below are the subsystems in Burrow.
- Clusters: This component periodically updates the topic list and the last committed offset for each partition.
- Consumers: This component fetches the information about consumer groups like consumer lag, etc.
- Storage: This component stores all the information in a system.
- Evaluator: Gets information from storage and checks the status of consumer groups, like if it’s consuming messages at a slow rate using consumer lag evaluation rules.
- Notifier: Requests the status of a consumer group and sends a notification if certain criteria are met via email, etc.
- HTTP server: Provides HTTP endpoints to fetch information about a cluster and consumers.
This looks like a good tool to hook into an existing monitoring solution.