Kafka Versions

Lenses 3.0 supports Kafka from version 1.0 up to the latest version, which at the time of release is Kafka 2.3.

If you are running on older versions of Kafka, you will need to check the compatibility on previous Lenses versions.

Especially for Lenses SQL processors running inside Kafka Connect, version 2.1 of Kafka Connect is required. In such a case, your Kafka Brokers can be at a different version. The alternative scenario is to run the processors inside Kubernetes.


Whilst Kafka 0.11 should also work, the experience might not be optimal and support will be given on a best-effort basis.


Distributions from the following are endorsed:

  1. Apache Kafka
  2. Cloudera
  3. Confluent
  4. HortonWorks

Other distributions and custom builds should work as well but have not been tested.

Lenses is also compatible with several managed services for Kafka such as Azure’s HDInsight.


Your Apache Kafka cluster must be accessible from the host that is running Lenses. Think of it as a typical producer or consumer which should have access to all the brokers in the cluster and the Zookeeper ensemble. Apache Kafka Connect and Schema registries from Hortonworks and Confluent are fully supported; however, their presence is optional.

It is recommended that Lenses is deployed in the same data center as the Apache Kafka cluster it links to.

Enable JMX

To make the most out of the monitoring capabilities, JMX metrics need to be enabled for the Kafka Brokers, Zookeepers, Schema Registry, Connect workers.

To enable JMX, the environment variable needs to be set for each of the above components before they are started in the format:


where [PORT] is the desired port for each running process.

Additional options should be set to access JMX remotely (from a different host) as shown below:

Kafka Brokers

Set JMX_PORT and KAFKA_JMX_OPTS environment variables:

Kafka Connect

Set JMX_PORT and KAFKA_JMX_OPTS environment variables:

Schema Registry

Set JMX_PORT and SCHEMA_REGISTRY_JMX_OPTS environment variables:


Set JMX_PORT and ZOOKEEPER_SERVER_OPTS environment variables:

Lenses also exposes its JMX so you can monitor it. A JMX agent starts automatically for Lenses, metrics are available at port number 9102.


Ensure the ports are reflected correctly in the lenses.conf file. Especially for the brokers, Lenses will autodetect JMX if enabled.

Hardware & OS

The minimum hardware specifications to install and effectively operate Lenses are:

  • 64bit Operating System
  • 4GB of free RAM
  • 500MB of disk space

On the server, a recent Linux 64 bit OS is recommended. RHEL 6.x and CentOS 6.x are partially supported through our docker image but you can’t run Lenses directly on them.

Open File Descriptors


$ ulimit -n -S # soft limit
$ ulimit -n -H # hard limit

Typically, on Linux, the soft limit is 1024 and can be set up to the hard limit by the user. To change the limit, superuser access is needed. A soft limit of 4096 is recommended for Lenses, though 2048 may be enough. To change the soft limit run:

$ ulimit -S -n 4096


Most recent versions of major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) are supported.

TLS Certificates

Lenses can use TLS to serve its API and content as described in Enabling TLS. For this functionality, it is required to create a Java keystore file that will provide the certificate and private key pair. For testing purposes, you can generate a self-signed certificate using the OpenSSL and keytool programs:


From the key/cert pair a PKCS12 file should be created:

openssl pkcs12 -export -in ./cert.pem -inkey ./key.pem -certfile ./ca.pem -out lenses.p12

During the export, a password is required which is the one that has to be set in the option lenses.ssl.key.password

Finally, the PKCS12 is imported to the keystore.

keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore lenses.p12 -srcstoretype pkcs12 -destkeystore lenses.jks -deststoretype JKS

During the import, the password that is used for the keystore has also to be set in lenses.ssl.keystore.password