Kafka Consumer

Consuming Apache Kafka messages and forwarding them to ilert as events or heartbeats.

Connection

Connect to your Kafka bootstrap broker(s):

ilagent daemon --kafka_brokers localhost:9092 --kafka_group_id ilagent \
    -e 'events-topic' -r 'heartbeats-topic'

Flag	Description	Default
--kafka_brokers	Comma-separated broker list (required)	—
--kafka_group_id	Consumer group ID (required)	—
-e	Topic for event messages	—
-r	Topic for heartbeat messages	—
-p	HTTP server port (for health/readiness endpoints)	(disabled)

Kafka mode does not start the HTTP server by default. Pass -p explicitly if you need /health and /ready endpoints (e.g. for Kubernetes probes).

Graceful shutdown

The Kafka consumer shuts down gracefully on SIGINT/SIGTERM — in-flight messages are finished processing and offsets are committed before exit. If the HTTP server is running (-p), the /health endpoint returns 503 during shutdown to allow load balancers or Kubernetes to drain traffic.

At least once delivery

In Kafka mode, events are not buffered in SQLite. Instead, the consumer offset is used to provide at-least-once delivery. If an event cannot be delivered, the offset is not committed and ilagent will exit after 5 seconds.

We recommend running ilagent so it is automatically restarted on exit:

docker run --restart always ilert/ilagent daemon \
    --kafka_brokers localhost:9092 --kafka_group_id ilagent \
    -e 'events-topic'

Payload format

All message payloads must be JSON. An example event payload using the default field names:

{
  "integrationKey": "il1api123...",
  "eventType": "ALERT",
  "summary": "Hey from Kafka"
}

If your payloads use different field names, you can map them with --map_key_etype, --map_key_summary, --map_key_alert_key, and set a fixed integration key with --event_key. See Event Mapping for details.

The integrationKey (or --event_key) must belong to a Kafka alert source in ilert. Events sent with integration keys from other alert source types will be rejected.

An example heartbeat payload:

{
  "integrationKey": "il1hbt123..."
}

Sample command

ilagent daemon -v -v \
    --kafka_brokers localhost:9092 \
    --kafka_group_id ilagent \
    -e 'events-topic' -r 'heartbeats-topic'

See Event Mapping for mapping custom message fields to ilert event properties.