How to view kafka message

Question

Is there any way I can view the message content sent to kafka for a given topic? Say some thing like view last 5 messages for this topic, if that it possible.

Answer 1

Use the Kafka consumer provided by Kafka :

bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server BROKERS --topic TOPIC_NAME

It will display the messages as it will receive it. Add --from-beginning if you want to start from the beginning.