Produce and Consume Messages in the Kafka Console
The Console keeps a Kafka producer and consumer in each topic tab. Read, inspect, and send messages without switching views.
What is a Kafka console?
A Kafka console is a tool for reading records from and writing records to Kafka
topics. Apache Kafka includes the kafka-console-consumer and
kafka-console-producer command-line tools; Kafma brings the same core workflow
into a graphical workspace.
Each topic opens in a tab where you can consume and produce messages, inspect record data and metadata, and keep the context needed to debug a stream.
Kafka producer and consumer in one tab
The upper half reads records from the topic. Start from the newest or oldest records, start from a timestamp, tail new records with Live, or use Watch Group to follow what a selected consumer group reads.
The producer stays open below. Send a single message, or run a timed loop that generates payloads from a registered schema. Refresh the stream to inspect what you sent, or use Live to watch it arrive.
See Consuming messages and Producing messages for the available controls.
Working with topic tabs
Select + and choose a topic, or open one from global search. Each topic opens in its own tab.
Tabs stay open while you work, so you can keep several investigations active. Each cluster has its own set of tabs, preventing local and production work from being mixed together.
Select the expand icon on the right side of the Console to open the topic details drawer. Check topic health, message count, retention, partitions, and consumer groups without leaving the tab.
Inspecting and reusing messages
Expand a message to see its key, value, headers, partition, offset, and timestamp. When a Schema Registry is configured, Avro and Protobuf payloads decode automatically.
You can replay the message to a topic in the same cluster, forward it to another cluster, or export messages as JSON or CSV. See Replay & export.