We have spent some time discussing brokers in depth in chapter 6 and client concerns throughout the earlier chapters. We saw some development practices that can be applied in most situations, but there will always be environments where special handling is required. The best way to keep a cluster moving along is to understand the data that is flowing through it and to monitor that activity at run time. Although operating Apache Kafka may not be the same as writing and running Java applications per se, it still requires monitoring log files and being aware of what is happening with our workloads.
So far, we have performed most of our cluster management activities with the command line tools that come with Kafka. And, in general, we need to be comfortable with a shell environment to set up and install Kafka. However, there are some helpful options we can use to branch out from these provided scripts.