Logs are an essential part of observing any service; without them you are flying blind. But collecting and analyzing them can be a real challenge -- especially at scale. Not only do you need to solve the basic task of collecting your logs, but you must do it in a reliable, performant, and robust manner. Nothing is more frustrating than having your logs pipeline fall on it's face during an outage, or even worse, disrupt more important services!

Fear not! In this guide we'll show you how to send collect logs from Kafka and send them anywhere and build a logs pipeline that will be the backbone of your observability strategy.

Background

What is Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open source project for a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system rethought as a distributed commit log. Kafka stores messages in topics that are partitioned and replicated across multiple brokers in a cluster. Producers send messages to topics from which consumers read. This makes it an excellent candidate for durably storing logs and metrics data.

Strategy

How This Guide Works

We'll be using Vector to accomplish this task. Vector is a popular open-source utility for building observability pipelines. It's written in Rust, making it lightweight, ultra-fast and highly reliable. And we'll be deploying Vector as a service.

The service deployment strategy treats Vector like a separate service. It is designed to receive data from an upstream source and fan-out to one or more destinations. For this guide, Vector will collect data from Kafka via Vector's kafka source. The following diagram demonstrates how it works.

What We'll Accomplish

To be clear, here's everything we'll accomplish in this short guide:

• Consume one or more Kafka topics.
  • Checkpoint your position to ensure data is not lost between restarts.
  • Enrich your logs with useful Kafka context.
• Send your logs to one or more destinations
• All in just a few minutes!

Tutorial

1. Install Vector

   •  For Humans
   •  For Machines

   curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.vector.dev | sh

   explain this command

   Or choose your preferred method.

2. Configure Vector

   Where do you want to send your data?

   Console

   cat <<-VECTORCFG > vector.toml
   [sources.in]
     bootstrap_servers = "10.14.22.123:9092,10.14.23.332:9092" # required
     group_id = "consumer-group-name" # required
     topics = ["^(prefix1|prefix2)-.+", "topic-1", "topic-2"] # required
     type = "kafka" # required
   
   [sinks.out]
     # Encoding
     encoding.codec = "json" # required
   
     # General
     inputs = ["in"] # required
     type = "console" # required
   VECTORCFG

   explain this command

3. Start Vector

   vector --config vector.toml

   That's it! Simple and to the point. Hit ctrl+c to exit.

How was it? Did this tutorial work?  Yes  No

Next Steps

Vector is powerful utility and we're just scratching the surface in this guide. Here are a few pages we recommend that demonstrate the power and flexibility of Vector:

Vector Github repo 4k

Vector is free and open-source!

Vector getting started series

Go from zero to production in under 10 minutes!

Vector documentation

Thoughtful, detailed docs that respect your time.