Datadog Kafka Connect Logs

datadog-kafka-connect-logs is a Kafka Connector for sending records from Kafka as logs to the Datadog Logs Intake API.

It is a plugin meant to be installed on a Kafka Connect Cluster running besides a Kafka Broker.

Requirements

1. Kafka version 1.0.0 and above.
2. Java 8 and above.
3. Confluent Platform 4.0.x and above (optional).

To install the plugin, one must have a working instance of Kafka Connect connected to a Kafka Broker. See also Confluent's documentation for easily setting this up.

Installation and Setup

Install from Confluent Hub

See Confluent's documentation and the connector's page on Confluent Hub.

Download from Github

Download the latest version from the GitHub releases page. Also see Confluent's documentation on installing community connectors.

Build from Source

1. Clone the repo from https://github.com/DataDog/datadog-kafka-connect-logs
2. Verify that Java8 JRE or JDK is installed.
3. Run mvn clean compile package. This will build the jar in the /target directory. The name will be datadog-kafka-connect-logs-[VERSION].jar.
4. The zip file for use on Confluent Hub can be found in target/components/packages.

Quick Start

1. To install the plugin, place the plugin's jar file (see previous section on how to download or build it) in or under the location specified in plugin.path . If you use Confluent Platform, simply run confluent-hub install target/components/packages/<connector-zip-file>.
2. Restart your Kafka Connect instance.
3. Run the following command to manually create connector tasks. Adjust topics to configure the Kafka topic to be ingested and set your Datadog api_key.

  curl localhost:8083/connectors -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
    "name": "datadog-kafka-connect-logs",
    "config": {
      "connector.class": "com.datadoghq.connect.logs.DatadogLogsSinkConnector",
      "datadog.api_key": "<YOUR_API_KEY>",
      "tasks.max": "3",
      "topics":"<YOUR_TOPIC>",
    }
  }'    

4. You can verify that data is ingested to the Datadog platform by searching for source:kafka-connect in the Log Explorer tab
5. Use the following commands to check status, and manage connectors and tasks:

    # List active connectors
    curl http://localhost:8083/connectors

    # Get datadog-kafka-connect-logs connector info
    curl http://localhost:8083/connectors/datadog-kafka-connect-logs

    # Get datadog-kafka-connect-logs connector config info
    curl http://localhost:8083/connectors/datadog-kafka-connect-logs/config

    # Delete datadog-kafka-connect-logs connector
    curl http://localhost:8083/connectors/datadog-kafka-connect-logs -X DELETE

    # Get datadog-kafka-connect-logs connector task info
    curl http://localhost:8083/connectors/datadog-kafka-connect-logs/tasks

See the the Confluent documentation for additional REST examples.

Configuration

After Kafka Connect is brought up on every host, all of the Kafka Connect instances will form a cluster automatically. A REST call can be executed against one of the cluster instances, and the configuration will automatically propagate to all instances in the cluster.

Parameters

Required Parameters

Name	Description	Default Value
name	Connector name. A consumer group with this name will be created with tasks to be distributed evenly across the connector cluster nodes.
connector.class	The Java class used to perform connector jobs. Keep the default unless you modify the connector.	com.datadoghq.connect.logs.DatadogLogsSinkConnector
tasks.max	The number of tasks generated to handle data collection jobs in parallel. The tasks will be spread evenly across all Datadog Kafka Connector nodes.
topics	Comma separated list of Kafka topics for Datadog to consume. prod-topic1,prod-topic2,prod-topic3
datadog.api_key	The API key of your Datadog platform.

General Optional Parameters

Name	Description	Default Value
datadog.tags	Tags associated with your logs in a comma separated tag:value format.
datadog.service	The name of the application or service generating the log events.
datadog.hostname	The name of the originating host of the log.
datadog.proxy.url	Proxy endpoint when logs are not directly forwarded to Datadog.
datadog.proxy.port	Proxy port when logs are not directly forwarded to Datadog.
datadog.retry.max	The number of retries before the output plugin stops.	5
datadog.retry.backoff_ms	The time in milliseconds to wait following an error before a retry attempt is made.	3000

Troubleshooting performance

To improve performance of the connector, you can try the following options:

• Increase the number of parallel tasks by adjusting the tasks.max parameter. Only do this if the hardware is underutilized, such as low CPU, low memory usage and low data injection throughput. Do not set more tasks than partitions.
• Increase hardware resources on cluster nodes in case of resource exhaustion, such as high CPU, or high memory usage.
• Increase the number of Kafka Connect nodes.

Single Message Transforms

Kafka Connect supports Single Message Transforms that let you change the structure or content of a message. To experiment with this feature, try adding these lines to your sink connector configuration:

transforms=addExtraField
transforms.addExtraField.type=org.apache.kafka.connect.transforms.InsertField$Value
transforms.addExtraField.static.field=extraField
transforms.addExtraField.static.value=extraValue

Now if you restart the sink connector and send some more test messages, each new record should have a extraField field with value value. For more in-depth video, see confluent's documentation.

Testing

Unit Tests

To run the supplied unit tests, run mvn test from the root of the project.

System Tests

We use Confluent Platform for a batteries-included Kafka environment for local testing. Follow the guide here to install the Confluent Platform.

Then, install the Confluent Kafka Datagen Connector to create sample data of arbitrary types. Install this Datadog Logs Connector by running confluent-hub install target/components/packages/<connector-zip-file>.

In the /test directory there are some .json configuration files to make it easy to create Connectors. There are configurations for both the Datagen Connector with various datatypes, as well as the Datadog Logs Connector. To the latter, you will need to add a valid Datadog API Key for once you upload the .json to Confluent Platform.

Once your connectors are set up, you will be able to test them and see relevant data. For performance tests, you can also use the following command packaged with Confluent platform:

kafka-producer-perf-test --topic perf-test --num-records 2000000 --record-size 100 --throughput 25000 --producer-props bootstrap.servers=localhost:9092 --print-metrics true

License

Datadog Kafka Connect Logs is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Details can be found in the file LICENSE.