How to crawl Apache Kafka

Updated April 17, 2023 13:14

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Once you have configured the Apache Kafka permissions, you can establish a connection between Atlan and Apache Kafka.

To crawl metadata from Apache Kafka, complete the following steps.

Select the source

To select Apache Kafka as your source:

In the top right of any screen in Atlan, navigate to +New and click New Workflow.
From the Marketplace page, click Apache Kafka Assets.
In the right panel, click Setup Workflow.

To enter your Apache Kafka credentials:

For Bootstrap servers, enter the hostname(s) of your Apache Kafka broker(s) — for multiple hostnames, separate each entry with a semicolon ;.
For Authentication, click No Auth if your Apache Kafka cluster does not require any authentication or click Basic to authenticate via username and password:
1. For Username, enter the username for your Apache Kafka brokers.
2. For Password, enter the password for the username.
For Security protocol, click Plaintext to connect to Apache Kafka through a non-encrypted channel or click SSL to connect via a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) channel.
Click the Test Authentication button to confirm connectivity to Apache Kafka.
Once authentication is successful, navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next.

To complete the Apache Kafka connection configuration:

Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might use values like production,development,gold, or analytics.
(Optional) To change the users who are able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins.
🚨 Careful! If you do not specify any user or group, no one will be able to manage the connection — not even admins.
Navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next to proceed.

Before running the Apache Kafka crawler, you can further configure it.

On the Metadata page, you can override the defaults for any of these options:

For Skip internal topics, keep the default option Yes to skip internal Apache Kafka topics or click No to enable crawling them.
To select the Apache Kafka assets you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude topics regex. (This will default to no assets, if none specified.)
To select the Apache Kafka assets you want to include in crawling, click Include topics regex. (This will default to all assets, if none are specified.)

💪 Did you know? If an asset appears in both the include and exclude filters, the exclude filter takes precedence.

To run the Apache Kafka crawler, after completing the steps above:

To run the crawler once, immediately, at the bottom of the screen, click the Run button.
To schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, at the bottom of the screen, click the Schedule & Run button.

Once the crawler has completed running, you will see the assets on Atlan's asset page! 🎉