Spring Boot Starter Kafka Ops
A Spring Boot starter that adds REST endpoints and an embedded web console to your service for Kafka message operations — poll, retry, corrections, batch browse, and DLT routing — without any extra infrastructure.
Why?
When your Kafka consumer fails to process a message, you typically need to manually re-consume it or write custom tooling. This starter gives you that tooling out of the box:
- Poll — Inspect a message at a specific topic/partition/offset with full metadata
- Batch browse — Browse multiple messages by offset range or timestamp
- Retry — Re-consume a message through your existing consumer logic
- Correct — Edit and send a corrected payload directly to your consumer
- DLT routing — Route messages from a Dead Letter Topic back to the retry topic automatically
- Web Console — Browser-based UI embedded in your service, no separate deployment
How is this different from Kafka UI / AKHQ / Kafdrop?
| Capability | Standalone Kafka UIs | kafka-ops |
|---|---|---|
| Retry through your app's business logic | No | Yes |
| Edit & correct, re-process through your app | No | Yes |
| Auto-discovers your consumers at startup | No | Yes |
| Uses your app's own serialization | Schema Registry only | Yes |
| Zero deployment (embedded in your service) | No | Yes |
| DLT drain on demand | No | Yes |
| Topic/schema/ACL management | Yes | No (out of scope) |
This library is an embedded ops tool for message-level investigation and remediation. It is not a Kafka cluster management platform.
Quick links
- Getting Started — Install and set up in 3 steps
- Configuration — All available properties
- REST API — Full endpoint reference
- Web Console — Console features and screenshots
- DLT Routing — Automatic Dead Letter Topic routing
- Message Formats — Avro, Protobuf, custom key and value codecs
- Security — Securing the endpoints and console