Use Observability Pipelines’ Kafka source to receive logs from your Kafka topics. Select and set up this source when you set up a pipeline. The Kafka source uses librdkafka.

Prerequisites

To use Observability Pipelines’ Kafka source, you need the following information available:

• The hosts and ports of the Kafka bootstrap servers, which clients should use to connect to the Kafka cluster and discover all the other hosts in the cluster.
• The appropriate TLS certificates and the password you used to create your private key, if your forwarders are globally configured to enable SSL.

Set up the source in the pipeline UI

Select and set up this source when you set up a pipeline. The information below is for the source settings in the pipeline UI.

1. Enter the group ID.
2. Enter the topic name. If there is more than one, click Add Field to add additional topics.
3. Optionally, toggle the switch to enable SASL Authentication and select the mechanism (PLAIN, SCHRAM-SHA-256, or SCHRAM-SHA-512) in the dropdown menu.
4. Optionally, toggle the switch to enable TLS. If you enable TLS, the following certificate and key files are required:
   • Server Certificate Path: The path to the certificate file that has been signed by your Certificate Authority (CA) Root File in DER or PEM (X.509).
   • CA Certificate Path: The path to the certificate file that is your Certificate Authority (CA) Root File in DER or PEM (X.509).
   • Private Key Path: The path to the .key private key file that belongs to your Server Certificate Path in DER or PEM (PKCS#8) format.
5. Optionally, click Advanced and click Add Option to add additional librdkafka options.
   1. Select an option in the dropdown menu.
   2. Enter a value for that option.
   3. Check your values against the librdkafka documentation to make sure they have the correct type and are within the set range.
   4. Click Add Option to add another librdkafka option.