alert on kafka consumer group lag against an slo using kafka-lag-exporter or burrow
domain: github.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Deploy kafka-lag-exporter (Helm chart or Docker image) pointed at the cluster's bootstrap servers and enable Kubernetes pod self-discovery if running on k8s.
Scrape the exporter's Prometheus HTTP endpoint and build lag and estimated-time-to-consume panels per consumer group and topic.
Alternatively deploy Burrow, which evaluates consumer status without manual threshold tuning, and poll its HTTP API.
Define an SLO-based alert (e.g., page when estimated lag time exceeds N minutes) in Alertmanager or the monitoring stack consuming Burrow's status API.
Correlate lag spikes with consumer group rebalance events and broker-side metrics to distinguish slow consumers from broker issues.
Known gotchas
kafka-lag-exporter estimates time lag using a regression against historical offsets, so an idle consumer group with no throughput can report misleading lag time until it resumes consuming.
Burrow's threshold-free evaluation still needs a minimum window of consumed offsets to produce a meaningful status; brand-new consumer groups can read as having too little data to evaluate.
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