Follow a topic live
Watch new records arrive in a topic as Kafka stores them.
The live tail shows records as producers write them, newest first. You need the records privilege.
- Open a topic and stay on the Data tab.
- Select Live in the mode switch. The dot on the button pulses while klens follows the topic.
- Optional: to narrow the tail, type in Search key or value…, or pick partitions in Filter. The schema picker applies too.
- To stop the list from moving, select Pause. Records written while the tail is paused do not appear later.
- To empty the list, select Clear.
The tail starts at the current end of each partition, so it shows no older records. The list keeps the newest 1,000 records.
When records are skipped
A tail shows at most 100 records in each update, and updates arrive at most every 250 milliseconds. When a topic produces faster, each update keeps the newest records and skips the rest. An amber skipped badge counts them. To read every record, use Newest or Oldest, or download the records.
tuning.tail.batch_limit and tuning.tail.interval set these limits. See configuration.
When the tail stops
klens serves at most 32 tails at once across every cluster, set by tuning.tail.max_live. Past that, a new tail fails with TOO_MANY_TAILS. When a tail stops for this or any other error, the page shows Live tail stopped. Select Retry to connect again.