Lenses Reviews

A great way to sample and query data in a GUI. We didn't have a reliable way to do that before.

Producing messages within Lenses seems to require that messages already exist on the topic, and if you use Avro, it will only use one schema for that topic.

Using Lenses, we realized our lo compaction strategy wasn't working. Lenses was a critical tool in finding the cause and fixing it.

Lenses provides a quick inside view of all you data flow.

It has helped our junior team coming from an SQL background to understand Kafka and its streaming nature much faster flattening the learning curve.

Lenses is amazing at providing insights into the Kafka topics as well as offering a broad range of tools for administering Kafka data policies, ACLs, SQL Processors, Kafka Connectors. I appreciate how easy it is to explore data using the SQL Studio tool. Also the continuous monitoring and audit capabilities are providing good value and instant feedback about the state of the Kafka cluster.

It would be nice to have a richer set of capabilities for supporting DataOps, such as the possibility of exporting and importing Data Policies, security configurations and ACLs in order to configure multiple instances of Lenses deployed in different environments.

Lenses is a great tool for opening access to the data stored in Kafka while ensuring a safe level of data access security using the Data Policies and Security Groups.

- Beautiful, responsive UI for kafka overview and with lenses SQL for kafka topics browsing

- Advanced kafka broker metrics which simplify monitoring and alerting

- Seamless data integration capabilities using lenses SQL processors

- Data protection policies and role based UI

Lenses is an intuitive tool that provides great observability and management features for our streaming environment. It has some very useful interfaces for managing and querying Kafka topics. Lenses has proven to increase productivity in our environment by enabling developers to more quickly ascertain state.

In the current release (3.2.1), some types of Kafka consumers (e.g. Apache Flink) appear as "inactive" even though they are active. This is not a "showstopper", but it could be confusing to some users.

Download the Lenses Box and run it locally to see all the features in action.

Lenses is helping us more quickly iterate on our streaming-related projects. It provides a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use interface that helps our developers troubleshoot Kafka-related issues. Additionally, it has been invaluable in helping us design our partitioning strategies, as well as capacity plan. Furthermore, it provides us with the means to easily query billions of IoT messages to troubleshoot devices in the field.

The support on their product! They are unparalleled and quick to respond to any question (even if the fault is not their own). Their team is always friendly and willing to help. It is a pleasure to work with them. Please never change! The slack community is a HUGE benefit for us users. The Lenses product is amazing and I am positive it has drastically increased our development times using Kafka.

Lack of KStream functions that work in the KSQL Studio, but not the KStreams option. I would LOVE to build custom functions for KStreams, but I hear that is coming sooner than later! Also wish the product had a few more stream reactor connectors and configs for the connectors. Would also love a "data type" converter inside of the UI to convert between string, Avro, JSon ,etc. formats.

Setting up kafka pipelines and transformations. Our development time has been improved drastically having the lenses UI. The tool also helps us maintain our kafka data, governance and security models as well. The tool is really becoming the center focus of our data ops team.

The view into the data in our Kafka topics, the ability to "scan through" the records in a topic and query it for troubleshooting.

There's no free/open version (but there is a trial version and local developer version). This makes the adoption curve a bit steep for small-scale deployments.

Try the Lenses Box docker image locally. This image can also works as a general and lightweight Kafka development environment.

We're using Lenses to enable our developers to effectively adopt and work with Kafka. The security features and data protection policies paves the way for a wide user base.

.Topologies, UX and how easy is to use #awesome

Lack of features regarding protobuf #proto

I'm solving problems regarding traceability

The ability to quickly filter the messages inside the Kafka topics by SQL.

P.S: the autocompletion suggestions are invaluable.

The fact that the SQL view to filter the topics messages only works with websockets enabled.

I like the custom serde ability and lenses sql.

buggy with configs, bugs in LSQL, VERY weird bash script for docker image env vars.