title: How to build efficient Kafka broker healthcheck?
body: <p>In my app I will perform some kind of health check of my Kafka cluster.</p>
  
  <p>Currently I make a <code>TopicMetadataRequest</code> to detect dead brokers:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  Future {
      // this will fail if Kafka is unavailable
      consumer.send(new TopicMetadataRequest(Seq("health-check-topic"), 1))
    }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Unfortunately this call produces a huge network traffic, because of Cluster topology/settings.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a better way to check kafka brokers? What I need is something simple like <code>true/false</code> indicator.</p>