Installing Control Center on Kafka
Control Center is included natively in Confluent Platform, but you can also use it with a cluster running Apache Kafka®.
Important
The version of Kafka that ships with Confluent Platform is for all intents and purposes identical to Kafka releases, with the possible exception of critical bug fixes. It is recommended that you use Control Center with Confluent Platform.
Software requirements
- Kafka Brokers running Kafka Version 0.10.2.0 or later
- Stream Monitoring requires several new features of Kafka 0.10.2.0 to function. The Confluent Kafka distribution
included with Confluent Platform 6.1 is recommended.
- Kafka Java Producers and Consumers running 0.10.1.0 or later
- Stream Monitoring requires several new features of Kafka 0.10.1.0 to function, including cluster ids. These are currently only available in the Kafka 0.10.1.0 Java clients.
- Ability to add jars to the classpath of client applications
- You do not need to recompile client applications, and may not need to reboot them if you are using a
class injection system like Java Beans or Spring.
- Ability to configure clients
- You must have the ability to change the configurations of Kafka clients so that you can specify parameters for
the Confluent Metrics Interceptor. (If you write your applications to dynamically load Kafka configuration
settings, you don’t need to recompile to use this feature. If you can dynamically change the parameters of
running applications, then you do not even need to restart them.
- Ability to configure Kafka brokers
- You must have the ability to change the configurations of Kafka brokers so that you can specify parameters for
the Confluent Metrics Reporter.
Control Center uses Kafka to collect data. You can configure Control Center to run with a replication factor
of 1 (thus requiring at least one Kafka broker in your cluster), but a replication factor of 3 is recommended for
production use (requires at least three brokers).
Hardware requirements
A server that meets these minimal requirements:
- 32 GB RAM (JVM default 6 GB); 8 or more cores
- 300 GB storage, preferably SSDs
- A supported operating system:
- Ubuntu 14.04 or later
- Debian 8 or later
- RHEL/Centos 6.8 or later
- Access to Kafka (specifically, the ability to consume messages and to communicate with ZooKeeper)
- Access to Kafka Connect instances (if you want to configure Kafka Connect)
- Ability to connect to the server from the user’s web browser
Users who need access to Control Center must be able to access the host that runs the application. You can
configure the network port that Control Center uses to serve data.
Because Control Center is a web application, you can use a proxy to control and secure access to it.
Install Control Center
Installation on Red Hat, CentOS, or Fedora
Installation instructions for installing the overall platform on Red Hat-style systems can be found at Manual Install using Systemd on RHEL and CentOS.
If you would like to install just Control Center on a server, first follow the instructions for configuring
Confluent repositories with your package manager. Then, you can install Control Center with a line like:
sudo yum install confluent-control-center
Installation on Debian Linux
Installation instructions
for the overall platform on Debian style systems can be found at Manual Install using Systemd on Ubuntu and Debian.
If you would like to install just Control Center on a server, first follow the instructions for configuring
Confluent repositories with your package manager. Then, you can install Control Center with a line like:
sudo apt-get install confluent-control-center
Start Control Center
You can use a script for starting Control Center, called control-center-start
.
This script takes one argument: a configuration file (control-center.properties
) that specifies the properties for Control Center. For information on what properties you must specify, see Control Center Configuration Reference. After you have configured the properties file, you can start Control Center.
<path-to-confluent>/bin/control-center-start etc/confluent-control-center/control-center.properties
If you would like to start Control Center as a daemon process, you can use the -daemon option:
<path-to-confluent>/bin/control-center-start -daemon etc/confluent-control-center/control-center.properties
You can navigate to the Control Center web interface at http://localhost:9092/.
License Keys
Confluent Control Center is proprietary software. If you have downloaded and installed Control Center from the Confluent Web Site and
are not a Confluent Enterprise subscription customer, you have already agreed to the license agreement. If you are a
Confluent Enterprise subscription customer, then you are bound by the terms of the agreement between your company and Confluent.
If you are not a customer, your download includes a 30 day free trial for Control Center. Control Center will stop
functioning 30 days after you install the software. Any Kafka
Connect Connectors that you created will still function; you can use the Kafka Connect API to change them, but
you cannot use Control Center to make changes to connectors. Stream Monitoring will continue to log data, but the
web application will not continue to function. If the Stream Monitoring functionality has become disabled, and you have
applied a Confluent license, please
contact Confluent
through the support portal for assistance.
If you would like to learn more about how to become a Confluent Platform
Enterprise subscription customer, please visit confluent.io. Customers are issued enterprise license keys and
all of the functions of Control Center will be unlocked for
the term of your subscription.
Note
Trial and developer licenses are shipped with Confluent Platform. A developer license allows using
Control Center and other Confluent Platform proprietary components indefinitely
for single-broker development environments.
For more information about Confluent Platform licenses, see Managing Confluent Platform Licenses.
Removing Control Center
If you would like to remove Control Center from your system, please follow these instructions.
TAR and ZIP Archives
Inside the archive, Control Center resources can be found in the following locations:
- Java Archives are found in
share/java/confluent-control-center
and share/java/monitoring-interceptors
- Configuration files are found in
etc/confluent-control-center
- Executables are in
bin/
with prefix control-center-
You can remove this all with a command like:
rm -rf share/java/confluent-control-center \
share/java/monitoring-interceptors \
etc/confluent-control-center \
bin/control-center-*
Debian packages
If you installed with apt-get
as a superuser, you can remove Control Center with a command like:
sudo apt-get remove confluent-control-center
Otherwise, follow the directions for the package management tool that you used.
Red Hat packages
If you installed with yum
as a superuser, you can remove Control Center with a command like:
sudo yum remove confluent-control-center
Otherwise, follow the directions for the package management tool that you used.