Kafka Consumer Lag Is the Metric Everyone Collects - and Almost Everyone Misunderstands
Ask almost any Platform Engineer:
"How do you monitor Kafka?"
The answer is usually immediate:
"Consumer lag."
Collecting Kafka consumer lag is easy. Understanding what it actually means is much harder. Here's why offsets alone are not enough to operate Kafka in production.
Kafka Consumer Lag Is the Metric Everyone Collects - and Almost Everyone Misunderstands
Ask almost any Platform Engineer:
"How do you monitor Kafka?"
The answer is usually immediate:
"Consumer lag."

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