Strimzi Kafbat Integration

[nissarkamal]

Hello,

We use Strimzi 0.45 (kraft mode) and our setup consists of separate nodepools for controllers (5 nodes) and brokers (5 nodes) with jbod storage (as of now we are only attaching a single disk). We also use Kafbat (formerly KUI) as our UI to look at topic and other Kafka related information. While we can use Kafbat to see the Strimzi cluster and the number of brokers, we have an issue with accessing the disk information. Upon reaching out to Kafbat we were told that this is probably because Strimzi does not publish the log_dirs info correctly, hence it cannot be pulled by the Kafka admin client that Kafbat uses.

While Strimizi allows us to deploy and manage Kafka is a simple straightforward way, the Kafbat integration is the last piece of the puzzle we are trying to solve before we hit production. We understand that Strimzi stores the logs differently from traditional Kakfa /var/lib/ vs /opt/kafka/ but is there a way to make it discoverable by the Kafka admin client?

[scholzj]

Strimzi configures the storage in a completely usual way using the log.dirs configuration. There is nothing special about it. So I do not see anything what would Strimzi do in some different way. You would have to provide more detailed information in the first place I guess.

[nissarkamal]

Thank you for your response. What I meant by strimzi stores logs differently, I meant the location of the log.dirs and the related confirguration information stored in the .properties file.

I am comparing it to Confluent Kafka, which has a Kafbat UI linked to it and we are able to see the disk information:

In Confluent Kafka, /etc/kafka/server.proterties has the following info:

A comma separated list of directories under which to store log files

log.dirs=/var/lib/kafka

In Strimizi broker, there is no such file as server.properties under /etc/kafka. The following grep command output is as shown below:

grep -r -i "log.dirs" .

./config/kraft/broker.properties:log.dirs=/tmp/kraft-broker-logs
./config/kraft/controller.properties:log.dirs=/tmp/kraft-controller-logs
./config/kraft/reconfig-server.properties:log.dirs=/tmp/kraft-combined-logs
./config/kraft/server.properties:log.dirs=/tmp/kraft-combined-logs
./config/server.properties:log.dirs=/tmp/kafka-logs
./custom-config/..2025_04_23_14_22_52.664430620/server.config:log.dirs=/var/lib/kafka/data-0/kafka-log10

The logs.dir provided in the custom-config folder is the only one that points to where the disk is mounted. Anything under /tmp does not exist. Not sure why log.dirs property is found is multiple .properties files and is this is what is confusing the Kafka admin client?

https://strimzi.io/docs/operators/latest/deploying section 33.2 says the following:

As such, you cannot configure the following options:

broker.id to specify the ID of the Kafka broker
log.dirs directories for log data

I hope the following thread will provide additional clarity on what we are seeing on Kafbat and what we would like to see: kafbat/kafka-ui#992

Thanks in advance.

[scholzj]

The files in the ./config directory are the examples provided by the Apache Kafka binary archives. They have nothing to do with Strimzi. The properties file used by Strimzi is elsewhere, but you should not use it anyway. Nobody should read the configuration files to figure out the Kafka configuration as it can be modified dynamically through the Kafka APIs as well but also because the location is an implementation detail and might change between releases etc. If Kafbat is using the Kafka APIs to get the broker configuration - as the issue you linked suggests - they should get the correct directories configured as log.dirs.