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

I work for a company with hundreds of developers who obviously need to check Kafka messages on a regular basis. Employees come and go and therefore we want to avoid the setup (dedicated SASL credentials, certificates, ACLs, ...) for each new employee.

Our platform teams operate a deployment of Kowl (https://github.com/cloudhut/kowl) so that everyone can access it without going through the usual setup. We also use it when developing locally using a docker-compose file.