Ground your agent engineering
in structured observability context

Apache Kafka's observability landscape is uniquely complex due to its distributed architecture, which separates brokers, producers, consumers, and ZooKeeper (or KRaft) into distinct components that each expose their own telemetry. Unlike simpler message queue systems, Kafka's JMX (Java Management Extensions) interface serves as the primary telemetry source, exposing hundreds of metrics across multiple layers of the stack. This JMX-based approach means monitoring typically requires exporters like Prometheus JMX Exporter or agents from vendors like Datadog and Dynatrace to transform these metrics into observable signals. The OpenTelemetry Collector has also emerged as a vendor-neutral option for Kafka metric collection, though implementation patterns vary significantly across observability backends.