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BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:SESS-26@sf26-agenda
DTSTAMP:20261020T151709Z
DTSTART:20261105T193000Z
DTEND:20261105T201500Z
SUMMARY:Kafka’s quiet observability superpower — Kafka Interceptors
LOCATION:Room 2010
DESCRIPTION:Brett Au\, Jeffrey Jennings\n\nThis 45-minute session explores 
 an often-overlooked capability hidden in plain sight within Apache Kafka s
 ince 2016: Kafka Interceptors. Based on the article\, “Kafka’s Quiet O
 bservability Superpower — Kafka Interceptors\,” the presentation demon
 strates how Kafka Interceptors can serve as a lightweight yet powerful obs
 ervability primitive for modern event-driven architectures. The core theme
  of the session is that observability in distributed Kafka-based microserv
 ice environments does not always require invasive application instrumentat
 ion\, expensive APM tooling\, or full adoption of OpenTelemetry. Instead\,
  Kafka Interceptors can quietly collect tracing signals directly at the pr
 oducer-consumer boundary\, allowing organizations to follow records as the
 y traverse complex event pipelines. The session introduces the concept of 
 “isotope tracing\,” in which lightweight metadata travels with events\
 , much like isotopes moving through a biochemical pathway. Technically\, t
 he presentation dives into the architecture and implementation behind the 
 confluent-kafka-isotope reference project. Attendees will see how Kafka In
 terceptors are paired with Apache Flink to transform raw tracing signals i
 nto actionable observability insights in both batch and near-real-time mod
 es. Topics include interceptor-based trace collection\, Kafka header propa
 gation\, Flink SQL analytics\, stateful stream processing\, latency analys
 is\, topology discovery\, stuck-trace detection\, forensic replay\, and an
 omaly identification across distributed systems. The session is designed f
 or Kafka engineers\, platform teams\, streaming architects\, SREs\, and ob
 servability practitioners looking for pragmatic approaches to tracing even
 t-driven systems. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of how 
 existing Kafka capabilities can be leveraged to build near-real-time obser
 vability pipelines with minimal application changes\, as well as practical
  architectural patterns they can apply immediately within their own Kafka 
 ecosystems. https://medium.com/@jeffrey.j.jennings/kafkas-quiet-observabil
 ity-superpower-kafka-interceptors-aca88c33867e
URL:https://sf26.rmoff.net/s/kafkas-quiet-observability-superpower-kafka-in
 terceptors-26
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