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redpanda-data/console
Redpanda Console is a developer-friendly UI for managing your Kafka/Redpanda workloads. Console gives you a simple, interactive approach for gaining visibility into your topics, masking data, managing consumer groups, and exploring real-time data with time-travel debugging.
A web UI for Kafka and Redpanda clusters, previously called Kowl. Go backend, React frontend, self-hosted via Docker or single binary. Covers the full operational surface: topic browsing, consumer group management, schema registry, Kafka Connect, and ACLs — with real-time message inspection and JavaScript-based filtering.
Time-travel debugging with JavaScript filter functions for message inspection is genuinely useful and hard to find in other Kafka UIs. Multi-format deserialization (Avro via schema registry, Protobuf, MessagePack, CBOR) is built-in and auto-detected — not bolted on. Integration test coverage is thorough across ACL, topic, schema registry, and connect services rather than just unit-tested mappers. Go backend is cleanly structured with ConnectRPC services that have versioned API layers (v1/v1alpha2) giving API stability guarantees.
Maintaining three simultaneous API versions (v1, v1alpha1, v1alpha2) for nearly every service creates serious surface area — the mapper/defaulter/service split per version means changing behavior requires touching six files. Enterprise features are silently absent in the OSS build (the enterprise-ci-skip workflow is a tell) — you won't know what you're missing until you hit a locked feature at a bad moment. Redpanda-specific capabilities (Transforms, admin API, RBAC) are mixed into the same codebase rather than cleanly gated, making it unclear which features actually work against plain Kafka. The JavaScript message filtering is powerful but the security model is undocumented — it's not obvious if user-supplied JS runs server-side or client-side and what the blast radius is.