Topics

Topic List

The Topic page lets you search for any topic on your currently selected Kafka cluster.

caution

Configure** RBAC** to restrict your users to View, Browse, or perform any operation only to certain topics.
Check the Settings for more info.

Multiple search capabilities can be combined to help you find to the topic you want faster.

Filtering is possible on:

• Topic name
• Show/Hide Internal topics (starts with _)
• Show/Hide Kafka Stream topics (ends with -repartition or -changelog)
• Cleanup policy
• Tags (click on tag to add/remove them from the filters, See Topic Tagging)

Sorting is possible on all columns.

Active columns can be picked from a list of Available columns from the side button « ⚙️ Edit columns »

info

Your current filters, active sort, and visible columns are stored in your browser's local storage for each Kafka Cluster and persist across sessions

Operations

Several actions are also available from the Topic List: Create topic, Add partitions, Empty topic and Delete topic.

Create Topic

On the Create Topic screen, you are asked to provide all the necessary information to create a topic.

info

The default choices made by Console are generally safe for most typical Kafka Production deployments.
If you want to understand more deeply what those parameters are about, here's some recommended reads:
Choosing the Replication Factor and Partition Count
Kafka Cleanup Policies Explained

Topic name

As per Kafka specification, topic name must only contain the following characters [a-zA-Z0-9._-] and not exceed 249 characters.

Partitions

This lets you define how scalable your topic will be for your consumers. In general you want a multiple of your number of brokers.

Default: 3

Replication factor

This configuration helps prevent data loss by writing the same data to more than one broker.

Default: min(3, number of brokers)

Cleanup Policy

The Cleanup policy (along with its associated advanced configurations) controls how the retention of your messages is done.

Tags

Use tags to organize your topics and facilitate searching them in Console

Advanced configuration

Upon toggling the Advanced configuration, you will be shown all the available topic configurations.

info

Read more about Apache Kafka topic configuration here

Add partitions

Increase the number of partitions for your topic. Number of partitions cannot be decreased.

caution

Adding partitions reshuffles the target partition of messages with a given key. Existing data will stay on the previous partition. Consumers that rely on partition ordering could be impacted.

Empty topic

This lets you delete all records from a topic. This operation is permanent and irreversible.

If you want to only delete all records from given partition, there's a dedicated operation on the Partitions tab of the topic detail.

Delete topic

This lets you delete the topic from Kafka. This operation is permanent and irreversible.

Topic Tagging

You can help categorize your Topics further using tags.
Associate Tags
To tag a topic, click the "Add tags" button from the topic details view and start typing to find available tags.
If the tag you need doesn't exist, a button will appear to create a new tag.
Then, check the tag(s) you want to associate to the topic and click "Apply".

Remove Tags
To remove tags, simply click the "X" icon on the tag name. No confirmation.

tip

Resource tagging is a power filtering feature that helps your organization & projects structure their resources.