Diagnose and Debug Apache Kafka Issues: Understanding Increased Request Rate, Response Time, and/or Broker Load

This post details the client request lifecycle in Kafka (producer.send() and consumer.poll()) and identifies key JMX metrics for monitoring broker health, including RequestMetrics, SocketServer, KafkaRequestHandlerPool, and RequestChannel metrics. It also provides diagnostic questions to help identify root causes of increased request rates, response times, and broker load, such as inefficient batching, client workload sizing, and excessive metadata requests.