Confluent Control Center Guide
Master Confluent Control Center, the enterprise Kafka monitoring and management platform. Learn about its features, licensing, and how it fits into your Kafka infrastructure strategy.
What is Confluent Control Center?
Confluent Control Center is an enterprise-grade GUI for managing and monitoring Apache Kafka clusters. It's part of the Confluent Platform and provides comprehensive visibility into cluster health, data flows, and stream processing applications.
Control Center Key Capabilities
Kafka Control Center Features
Cluster Monitoring
Real-time visibility into broker health, partition status, and cluster performance. Control Center collects metrics through interceptors and provides dashboards for throughput, latency, and resource utilization.
- • Broker CPU, memory, and disk usage
- • Under-replicated partition alerts
- • Network throughput visualization
- • ISR status monitoring
Data Flow Monitoring
Track messages from producers through Kafka to consumers with end-to-end latency visibility. Requires Confluent Monitoring Interceptors in client applications.
- • Producer-to-consumer latency tracking
- • Message delivery confirmation
- • Throughput per topic/partition
- • Consumer lag visualization
Alerting
Configure alerts for cluster health metrics, consumer lag, and data flow anomalies. Integrates with email and PagerDuty for notifications.
- • Configurable threshold-based alerts
- • Consumer lag alerts
- • Cluster health notifications
- • Email and PagerDuty integration
Licensing Considerations
Important: Control Center Requires Confluent License
Confluent Control Center is not open source. It requires a Confluent Platform Enterprise license and is priced based on broker count. The 30-day trial is available, but production use requires a commercial license.
- • Enterprise license required for production use
- • Pricing based on number of brokers
- • Additional costs for Confluent Cloud integration
- • Community Edition has limited functionality
What's Included in Different Tiers
| Feature | Community | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Cluster Monitoring | Limited | Full |
| Consumer Lag | Basic | Full |
| Alerting | No | Yes |
| Data Flow Monitoring | No | Yes |
| Multi-Cluster | No | Yes |
Setting Up Control Center
Docker Quick Start
# docker-compose.yml (requires Confluent Platform images)
services:
control-center:
image: confluentinc/cp-enterprise-control-center:7.5.0
hostname: control-center
depends_on:
- broker
- schema-registry
ports:
- "9021:9021"
environment:
CONTROL_CENTER_BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS: 'broker:29092'
CONTROL_CENTER_SCHEMA_REGISTRY_URL: "http://schema-registry:8081"
CONTROL_CENTER_REPLICATION_FACTOR: 1
CONTROL_CENTER_INTERNAL_TOPICS_PARTITIONS: 1
CONTROL_CENTER_MONITORING_INTERCEPTOR_TOPIC_PARTITIONS: 1Enabling Monitoring Interceptors
For full data flow monitoring, add interceptors to your producers and consumers:
# Producer configuration
interceptor.classes=io.confluent.monitoring.clients.interceptor.MonitoringProducerInterceptor
# Consumer configuration
interceptor.classes=io.confluent.monitoring.clients.interceptor.MonitoringConsumerInterceptorControl Center Limitations
High License Costs
Enterprise licensing can be expensive, especially for larger clusters. Cost scales with broker count, making it prohibitive for some organizations.
Interceptor Overhead
Full monitoring requires interceptors in every client application, adding latency and operational complexity to deployments.
Confluent Platform Lock-in
Tightly integrated with Confluent Platform. Switching to or from Control Center requires significant migration effort.
Resource Requirements
Control Center itself requires significant resources and creates internal topics that add to cluster overhead.
Looking for a Control Center Alternative?
KLogic provides enterprise-grade Kafka monitoring without the licensing complexity of Control Center. Get comprehensive observability at a fraction of the cost.