Kafka UI is a free open-source web tool that gives you a visual dashboard to monitor and manage your Kafka cluster. Instead of running commands in terminal every time, you can see topics, partitions, consumer groups, messages, and offsets directly in a browser.

You run it as a Docker container — it connects to your running Kafka and shows everything visually.

Prerequisites

• Kafka must be running
• Docker must be installed

# Check Docker is installed
docker --version

# Install Docker if not present
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y docker.io
sudo systemctl start docker
sudo systemctl enable docker

Step 1 — Edit server.properties to expose IP

By default Kafka only listens on localhost. For Kafka UI (running in Docker) to reach Kafka, you need to set your machine's actual IP in the config.

Find your IP:

ip addr show
# or
hostname -I

Look for something like 10.x.x.x — that is your machine IP.

Edit server.properties:

nano ~/kafka_2.13-4.2.0/config/server.properties

Find the advertised.listeners line and update it with your IP:

advertised.listeners=PLAINTEXT://<YOUR_IP>:9092,CONTROLLER://localhost:9093

Example:

advertised.listeners=PLAINTEXT://10.211.55.7:9092,CONTROLLER://localhost:9093

Save and exit (Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X in nano).