Kafdrop: I can see you, Protobuf
Kafdrop is a web UI built on top of Spring Boot. It's free and has a good dark theme. (Well, the dark theme is the only theme it provides, actually.) Speaking of kafka web UI, there is another web UI like the Kafka UI - which also has the capability of browsing message, but at the time I write this blog post Kafdrop is the only one that supports viewing protobuf message. Since I've been dealing a lot with kafka protobuf messages lately, I needed to know how to use Kafdrop with protobuf support. Because you know, it's such a pain in the eye viewing protobuf using kafkacat and protoc : kafkacat -b kafka:9092 -C -t topic.name -o beginning -e | protoc --decode_raw Luckily after few days of fooling around, I found that making kafdrop to work with protobuf is not a hard thing to do. The Kafdrop Readme says that I need to put the protobuf descriptor file ( .desc ) to a directory, and pass the directory path as a parameter to Kafdrop. Creating a descriptor file from a .prot