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Kafka Troubleshooting Toolkit

Kafka Troubleshooting Toolkit

Diagnose broker and controller issues, under-replicated partitions, consumer lag, rebalances, and retention with prompts and Kafka runbooks.

Start troubleshooting Browse Kafka prompts

Top Kafka errors

Start with the most common production issues and troubleshooting paths.

AI-Assisted Kafka Troubleshooting Explained

How AI-assisted Kafka troubleshooting works — diagnosing broker faults, consumer lag, rebalance storms, and ISR shrink faster…

Debugging Kafka Consumer Lag with AI

Measure Kafka consumer lag correctly, find the real root cause with AI-assisted analysis, and apply durable fixes — from poison…

AuthorizationException

Fix Kafka AuthorizationException: diagnose missing ACLs, wrong principal mapping, allow.everyone.if.no.acl.found, super.users…

java.io.IOException: Broken pipe

Fix Kafka 'Broken pipe' — diagnose writes to closed sockets, idle-timeout disconnects, oversized requests, and broker-side conn…

Broker may not be available

Fix Kafka 'Connection to node 1 could not be established. Broker may not be available': diagnose down brokers, wrong bootstrap…

BrokerEndPointNotAvailableException

Fix Kafka BrokerEndPointNotAvailableException: a listener or security protocol has no advertised endpoint. Fix listeners, adver…

CertificateExpiredException

Fix Kafka CertificateExpiredException: diagnose expired broker or client certs, expired CA roots, clock skew, and short-lived c…

ClusterAuthorizationException

Fix Kafka ClusterAuthorizationException: diagnose missing CLUSTER ACLs, idempotent producer IdempotentWrite, transactional IDs…

Best Kafka prompts

Use these prompts to turn symptoms, logs, and config into a structured troubleshooting plan.

Kafka Cluster Sizing & Capacity Planning

Size a Kafka cluster end to end — broker count, partition counts, retention, disk, memory, and network — for a target throughput, with headroom for spikes and broker failure.

Kafka Consumer Lag Investigation

Investigate and reduce growing consumer lag by isolating the root cause — slow processing, partition skew, GC pauses, or broker-side bottlenecks — then prescribe targeted fixes.

Kafka Consumer Rebalance Storm Triage

Diagnose frequent or looping consumer-group rebalances by working through session, heartbeat, and poll timeouts, static membership, and the rebalance protocol in use.

Kafka Exactly-Once Semantics Design

Design exactly-once processing across a produce-process-consume pipeline using the idempotent producer and transactions, with honest guidance on where EOS holds and where it does not.
All Kafka prompts

Free Kafka tools

Validate, troubleshoot, or analyze your configuration before production changes.

AI Incident Response Assistant

Paste broker logs and consumer-group state, get a triage plan.

Start triage

YAML validator

Validate Connect configs and Kubernetes/Strimzi manifests before applying.

Open validator

Kafka runbook

Use a repeatable checklist for production troubleshooting.

A checklist for brokers, partitions, and consumers that fall behind or drop out.

  1. 1 Check broker and controller status
  2. 2 Inspect partitions and ISR (under-replicated / offline)
  3. 3 Review consumer-group lag and recent rebalances
  4. 4 Check KRaft / ZooKeeper quorum and connectivity
  5. 5 Validate retention, throughput, and disk headroom
Get the runbook checklist