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Message bus integration consumer and producer tooling for message bus probe and gateway

Question & Answer


Question

How is the connection from the message bus probe to the Kafka server checked?

Cause

The Kafka server administrator can check the connection to the Kafka connection locally on the server.
However, there is no way to perform connectivity checks from the message bus probe server, in the manner of the message bus probe.

Answer

The openssl command can be used to check the availability of the Kafka services from the probe server.
openssl s_client -connect <FQDN>:2181
openssl s_client -connect <FQDN>:9093
The Kafka administrator can check and confirm the consumer properties on the server.
These settings can be used with message bus probes configuration.
The debug transport log does not always provide the required detail for Kafka connection problems.
The Kafka consumer properties provided by the Kafka administrator can be used to check for connectivity issues on the probe server with the Apache Kafka consumer.
Download the kcat-utils.tar file and install in the $NCHOME/omnibus/utils directory for testing.
Ensure that the Apache Kafka jars are installed in the libs directory.
Example Kafka client connection tools
Files:
 
README.txt                      Review this file before using the tools
 
README.heartbeating.txt         Creating the heartbeating topic on the Kafka Server for testing

connect-log4j.properties        Working logj4 properties
connect-log4j.properties.debug  Example DEBUG logj4 properties
connect-log4j.properties.info   Example INFO logj4 properties
client.properties               Working Kafka client configuration
client.properties.plaintext     Example simple Kafka client configuration
client.properties.scram         Example SCRAM Kafka client configuration
client.properties.ssl           Example SSL Kafka client configuration
 
Simple client scripts.
kcat_consumer.sh                Kafka Consumer [probe]
kcat_producer.sh                Kafka Producer [gateway]
Directories that need to be populated.
libs                            Apache Kafka libs directory [jars]
ssl                             Apache Kafka servers certificates
The tools can be used to confirm the settings used by the message bus probe and xml gateway.
The scripts can be run on the probe or gateway server to confirm and debug the Kafka service with the standard Apache Kafka classes.
Send a message to the heartbeating topic [gateway].
Example usage.
./kcat_producer.sh <FQDN>:9093 heartbeating normal
Read messages on the heartbeating topic [probe].
Example usage.
./kcat_consumer.sh <FQDN>:9093 heartbeating normal
To enable the debug logging, set the last option from 'normal' to 'debug'.
The Kafka administrator creates the heartbeating topic in the Kafka server for the tools to use as a test topic.

Download the Kafka utilities tar file.

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Document Information

Modified date:
01 June 2023

UID

ibm16838793

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