layout: doc_page

Tutorial: Load from Kafka

Getting started

This tutorial shows you how to load data from Kafka into Druid.

For this tutorial, we‘ll assume you’ve already downloaded Druid and Tranquility as described in the single-machine quickstart and have it running on your local machine. You don't need to have loaded any data yet.

Start Kafka

Apache Kafka is a high throughput message bus that works well with Druid. For this tutorial, we will use Kafka 0.9.0.0. To download Kafka, issue the following commands in your terminal:

curl -O http://www.us.apache.org/dist/kafka/0.9.0.0/kafka_2.11-0.9.0.0.tgz
tar -xzf kafka_2.11-0.9.0.0.tgz
cd kafka_2.11-0.9.0.0

Start a Kafka broker by running the following command in a new terminal:

./bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties

Run this command to create a Kafka topic called metrics, to which we'll send data:

./bin/kafka-topics.sh --create --zookeeper localhost:2181 --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --topic metrics

Send example data

Let's launch a console producer for our topic and send some data!

In your Druid directory, generate some metrics by running:

bin/generate-example-metrics

In your Kafka directory, run:

./bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list localhost:9092 --topic metrics

The kafka-console-producer command is now awaiting input. Copy the generated example metrics, paste them into the kafka-console-producer terminal, and press enter. If you like, you can also paste more messages into the producer, or you can press CTRL-D to exit the console producer.

You can immediately query this data, or you can skip ahead to the Loading your own data section if you'd like to load your own dataset.

Querying your data

After sending data, you can immediately query it using any of the supported query methods.

Loading your own data

So far, you‘ve loaded data into Druid from Kafka using an ingestion spec that we’ve included in the distribution. Each ingestion spec is designed to work with a particular dataset. You load your own data types into Imply by writing a custom ingestion spec.

You can write a custom ingestion spec by starting from the bundled configuration in conf-quickstart/tranquility/kafka.json and modifying it for your own needs.

The most important questions are:

What should the dataset be called? This is the “dataSource” field of the “dataSchema”.
Which field should be treated as a timestamp? This belongs in the “column” of the “timestampSpec”.
Which fields should be treated as dimensions? This belongs in the “dimensions” of the “dimensionsSpec”.
Which fields should be treated as measures? This belongs in the “metricsSpec”.

Let's use a small JSON pageviews dataset in the topic pageviews as an example, with records like:

{"time": "2000-01-01T00:00:00Z", "url": "/foo/bar", "user": "alice", "latencyMs": 32}

First, create the topic:

./bin/kafka-topics.sh --create --zookeeper localhost:2181 --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --topic pageviews

Next, edit conf-quickstart/tranquility/kafka.json:

Let's call the dataset “pageviews-kafka”.
The timestamp is the “time” field.
Good choices for dimensions are the string fields “url” and “user”.
Good choices for measures are a count of pageviews, and the sum of “latencyMs”. Collecting that sum when we load the data will allow us to compute an average at query time as well.

You can edit the existing conf-quickstart/tranquility/kafka.json file by altering these sections:

Change the key "metrics-kafka" under "dataSources" to "pageviews-kafka"
Alter these sections under the new "pageviews-kafka" key:

"dataSource": "pageviews-kafka"

"timestampSpec": {
     "format": "auto",
     "column": "time"
}

"dimensionsSpec": {
     "dimensions": ["url", "user"]
}

"metricsSpec": [
     {"name": "views", "type": "count"},
     {"name": "latencyMs", "type": "doubleSum", "fieldName": "latencyMs"}
]

"properties" : {
     "task.partitions" : "1",
     "task.replicants" : "1",
     "topicPattern" : "pageviews"
}

Next, start Druid Kafka ingestion:

bin/tranquility kafka -configFile ../druid-#{DRUIDVERSION}/conf-quickstart/tranquility/kafka.json

If your Tranquility server or Kafka is already running, stop it (CTRL-C) and start it up again.

Finally, send some data to the Kafka topic. Let's start with these messages:

{"time": "2000-01-01T00:00:00Z", "url": "/foo/bar", "user": "alice", "latencyMs": 32}
{"time": "2000-01-01T00:00:00Z", "url": "/", "user": "bob", "latencyMs": 11}
{"time": "2000-01-01T00:00:00Z", "url": "/foo/bar", "user": "bob", "latencyMs": 45}

Druid streaming ingestion requires relatively current messages (relative to a slack time controlled by the windowPeriod value), so you should replace 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z in these messages with the current time in ISO8601 format. You can get this by running:

python -c 'import datetime; print(datetime.datetime.utcnow().strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"))'

Update the timestamps in the JSON above, then copy and paste these messages into this console producer and press enter:

./bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list localhost:9092 --topic pageviews

That's it, your data should now be in Druid. You can immediately query it using any of the supported query methods.