Our journey from Kafka-Topics-UI to a Multi-Kafka Developer Experience

Updated by Drew Oetzel: 26th May 2025

This is an update to our 2016 blog about viewing Kafka-Topics-UI, an ancestor of today’s Lenses 6.0. 

Lenses 6.0 includes an advanced Kafka Topics UI across every cluster at once, as well as extended streaming data exploration, processing, and permission model. 

Getting to grips with Kafka management 

Back in 2016, we spoke of Kafka as the de facto platform for streaming architectures. That’s still the case almost 10 years later in 2025. What’s different now is that Kafka’s ecosystem has matured. Being told to “download Kafka” as part of a pilot project is a thing of the past.

Now, it's the backbone of streaming architectures. Basic familiarity with Kafka management is commonplace for platform teams; and working with data streams is a must for modern development teams. .

The previous version of this blog also noted that, at the time, the growth of data streaming was being pushed by event-driven architecture (EDA). In subsequent years, EDA has become even more common, but other use cases have also developed. 

Real-time decision-making and AI have pushed streaming technologies even further to the center of modern data stacks. 

Kafka has become the industry standard for streaming data architectures. At the same time, the use of streaming technology continues to increase. Companies have now started using several Kafka clusters across different environments and vendors. 

The proliferation of Kafka means UI tools and developer portals need to adapt to our present-day “Multi-Kafka” reality. This is where the need for a capable Kafka monitoring tool, Kafka dashboard becomes clear, to unify the experience.

Thinking back to Kafka-Topics-UI 

Kafka-Topics-UI centralized key topic-related actions. It meant users could explore data, view schemas, and manage topics all in one place. We launched the platform as a Kafka UI tool that allowed browsing data from Kafka Topics and a lot more. 

Kafka-Topics-UI interacts with the Kafka rest-proxy to allow browsing data from Kafka Topics. At the same time, it acted as a single entry point to explore i) Kafka data, ii) Kafka Schemas, and iii) Kafka connectors such as partitions per topic, replication factor per topic and topic configurations.

Kafka-Topics-UI features

• Identifies and visualizes Kafka topics and config overrides

• Automatically detects data types (Avro|JSON|Binary)

• Base64 decodes and parses of binary topics

• Provides Table and JSON views

• Allows downloading data from Kafka topics

• Displays number of partitions and replication factor per topic

• Docker container

These features make Kafka-Topics-UI both a useful Kafka UI tool and an essential Kafka monitoring tool for developers and data teams.

Using it with Lenses Community Edition

You can download Lenses 6.0 to find, view, explore and inspect Kafka topics by visiting https://lenses.io/community-edition/ and running the docker compose.

This gives you an instant Kafka dashboard experience for your clusters, right in your browser. 

Lenses 6.0 - A Kafka Topics UI kicked into high gear

Kafka-Topics-UI lets you browse and inspect individual topics. However, today’s setups, including running Kafka without Zookeeper, need more powerful tools. Lenses 6.0 simplifies working across multiple Kafka clusters with a single, consistent interface.

Lenses 6.0 is designed for large-scale deployments. Switch from searching one topic at a time, to browsing all your topics at once. You can use it to manage, query, and monitor Kafka across your entire infrastructure.

Lenses 6 allows you to bring all your Kafka clusters: any cloud, on-prem, and any vendor into one unified interface. This means the updated Topics view page shows you not only a list of all Kafka topics available on one screen, but allows you to search messages, environments and more across them. 

Let’s take a look:

• Multiple topics across multiple clusters in a searchable interface.

• Find topics quickly with keyword search. 

• Even search inside schemas quickly by ticking the “Search in schema” tickbox in the search bar to search by key. 

A lot of the other functionality we described back in 2016 has moved out of the topics view into other parts of the modern Lenses application. But you can still see the number of events, the schema type, number of partitions, retention time and more, all from a single searchable view. 

Try out Lenses yourself with our always free Community Edition available for download here: https://lenses.io/community-edition/

Lenses 6.0 offers the best in Kafka management. Whether you're using it as a Kafka dashboard, a Kafka monitoring tool, or simply to explore your clusters with ease.