Kafka: Cluster Health Check

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Kafka cluster in KRaft mode doesn’t forgive neglect until the first incident. Health checks need to be regular and quick — no graphs or dashboards, just the terminal. Here’s the command set that covers the typical checklist: processes, quorum, partition leaders, ISR, and a quick status report in one shot.

Checking KRaft Processes

KRaft mode has no separate ZooKeeper — the controller role is either co-located with the broker or isolated on dedicated nodes. First, verify the JVM processes are alive and see which mode each node started in.

Kafka on Lead DevOps

Kafka: Cluster Health Check

Checking KRaft Processes