Content
# kafka-sentinel-mcp
**Give AI agents safe, read-only eyes on your Kafka clusters.**
An [MCP (Model Context Protocol)](https://modelcontextprotocol.io) server that exposes Kafka cluster health, consumer lag, partition state, and replay-readiness as structured tools — so LLM agents (Claude, or any MCP client) can diagnose streaming incidents without ever being able to break anything.
Built by an engineer who spent a decade running Kafka-based financial messaging at 99.999% availability, and got tired of every "AI + Kafka" demo assuming write access to production.
## Why this exists
When a consumer group stalls at 3 a.m., the questions are always the same: Is it lag? A stuck partition? A rebalance storm? An offset reset gone wrong? These are pattern-matching questions — exactly what LLM agents are good at — but no operator will hand an agent admin rights on a production cluster.
`kafka-sentinel-mcp` draws a hard line: **every tool is read-only by design**, enforced at the client-config level (no admin operations are even imported). The agent can observe, correlate, and recommend; a human executes.
## Tools
| Tool | What it returns |
|---|---|
| `list_topics` | All non-internal topics with partition count and replication factor — start here if you don't know a topic name |
| `list_consumer_groups` | All consumer group IDs with state — start here if you don't know a group name |
| `cluster_health` | Broker count, controller status, under-replicated / offline partition counts |
| `consumer_lag` | Per-group, per-topic, per-partition lag with committed vs end offsets |
| `topic_audit` | Replication factor, min.insync.replicas, retention, and flags configs that violate durability best practice |
| `partition_state` | Leaders, ISR shrinkage, skew across brokers |
| `replay_readiness` | For a group + topic: earliest available offsets vs committed, i.e., "can we still replay what we missed?" |
| `incident_snapshot` | One-call bundle of all the above, timestamped — designed for pasting into a postmortem |
## Quick start
```bash
pip install kafka-sentinel-mcp # (or: uv tool install)
# Run against your cluster (read-only credentials!)
KAFKA_BOOTSTRAP=localhost:9092 kafka-sentinel-mcp
```
Add to Claude Desktop / any MCP client:
```json
{
"mcpServers": {
"kafka-sentinel": {
"command": "kafka-sentinel-mcp",
"env": { "KAFKA_BOOTSTRAP": "broker1:9092,broker2:9092" }
}
}
}
```
Then ask your agent: *"Why is the payments-consumer group falling behind, and can we still replay from where it stalled?"*
## Security posture
- Read-only: no produce, no topic/config mutation, no offset commits, no ACL ops.
- Supports SASL/SSL; credentials via env only, never logged.
- Every tool call is logged with caller context for audit.
- Recommended: run with a Kafka principal that has `Describe`/`Read` ACLs only — the server degrades gracefully and reports what it can't see.
## Status
Early. See [ROADMAP.md](ROADMAP.md). Issues and PRs welcome — especially war stories about what you wish an agent could have told you during an incident.
## License
MIT
<!-- mcp-name: io.github.sanjay-amu/kafka-sentinel-mcp -->
