With over 500,000 residential, business, and wholesale customers across multiple markets in the United States, WideOpenWest (WOW!) is one of the United States’ largest broadband providers. They aim to connect homes and businesses to the world with fast and reliable internet, TV, and phone services.

In this article, we are going to discuss how to set up Kafka monitoring using Prometheus. Kafka is one of the most widely used streaming platforms, and Prometheus is a popular way to monitor Kafka. We will use Prometheus to pull metrics from Kafka and then visualize the important metrics on a Grafana dashboard. We will also look at some of the challenges of running a self-hosted Prometheus and Grafana instance versus the Hosted Grafana offered by MetricFire.

This is the third blog in our series on Kafka, where we continue to explore the nuances of deploying Kafka for scale. In our previous blogs, Essential Metrics for Kafka Performance Monitoring and Auto-Instrumenting OpenTelemetry for Kafka, we laid the foundation for understanding Kafka’s performance and monitoring aspects. Now, as we explore further into the Kafka ecosystem, we’re here to tackle the common challenges that can arise during deployment and scaling.