Solace Event Portal update enables visibility, management and control of Apache Kafka deployments

San Jose, CA, September 26, 2023 – Solace, an enabler of event-driven architecture for real-time enterprises, today announced a new version of its Solace Event Portal solution that gives organizations with Apache Kafka deployments better visibility into, and control over, their Kafka event streams, brokers and associated assets.

Enterprises worldwide are embracing event-driven and streaming architectures to become more agile and real-time in their operations and customer interactions. Many organizations rely on Apache Kafka as their event streaming platform, and often must use a variety of tools for software development, lifecycle management, governance and monitoring/observability, resulting in a large gap between the event-driven architecture components that actually exists and what is accurately and visibly known.

This makes it difficult for developers and architects to collaborate on the design, deployment and operation of their Kafka applications, and for administrators to ensure security, governance and compliance with internal policies and government regulations.

Comprehensive Event Portal FunctionalityThe latest release of Solace Event Portal for Apache Kafka, generally available now, was specifically designed to address these challenges, offering application development teams a complete set of functionality to help them better understand, visualize, discover and re-use their Kafka assets, including:  

• A native discovery agent that scans a Kafka cluster and its schema registry to produce a visual representation of every topic and its schema(s) across multiple versions, and who its consumers are. At a quick glance, architects and administrators can easily understand the overall application architecture of relationships between producers, consumers, their event interface as well as KPIs, such as the most and least used topics
• A rich catalog detailing all topics, event streams, schemas and pub/sub interfaces for each application, along with owners and points of contact, as well as changes for each of the managed EDA entities, helping expedite development by letting developers easily share, discover and re-use any existing Kafka asset
• An audit capability that enables users to easily identify discrepancies between runtime and design intent so that the information developers see in the Event Portal is always accurate and not a stale Word or Confluence page
• The ability to implement best practices in the areas of designing, securing and governing event streams. Users can organize systems into application domains, create and import payload schema definitions in a variety of formats including AsyncAPI, define event interactions between application and microservices, and create events and associated topic addresses using topic structure proven practices
• Complete lifecycle management and version control capabilities that enable application teams to more efficiently manage their Kafka environments from creation to deployment, and evolution over time through to retirement
• Easy integration with software development lifecycle (SDLC) tools that make up an organization’s development ecosystem

“Event management software is a critical component for real-time streaming applications, helping organizations discover, govern and manage the lifecycle of their Kafka event streams,” said Matt Aslett, VP and Research Director at Ventana Research. “Solace Event Portal for Apache Kafka provides the tooling to help organizations manage their Kafka-based event-driven applications.”

Delivering a one-stop portal to discover, visualize, catalog and re-use event streams, Solace Event Portal for Apache Kafka ultimately helps enterprises like Freeus improve the agility, compliance and responsiveness of their event-driven applications so their lines of businesses can operate at peak performance, providing their customers the best possible service.

“As part of implementing Kafka to connect new microservices, we needed a way to visualize our system, track the versions of all our Kafka event streams, and give our team the ability to see how adding or changing a stream would impact services across our organization,” said Caleb New, Software Architect at Freeus, an award-winning wholesale provider of mobile medical alerts and personal safety systems. “Solace helps us organize all of our automation and QA efforts and accelerate development by letting architects and developers within our own team and sister organizations see, at a glance, what event streams they can tap into as they create and enhance applications.”

Read the full Freeus case study here.

Market Leadership

The Apache Kafka-focused solution is part of a broader offering that is Solace Event Portal, a product that pioneered the event management category back in 2020. Solace’s vision is for its Event Portal to be universally applicable to all popular event brokers including Confluent, Amazon MSK and Redpanda, providing a single place to discover, catalog, design and govern all of the event streams in a distributed enterprise.

This latest release is also yet another milestone in Solace’s Event Horizon initiative, geared to helping businesses adopt, manage and leverage event-driven architecture at enterprise scale.

“Our mission is to help enterprises reap the benefits of being real-time through the use of event driven applications. This often requires the use of different types of event brokers for good reason, but nobody wants different portals to manage their event streams. With these new capabilities for users of Apache Kafka, we are advancing our vision of a single multi-broker portal that delivers unprecedented visibility into all event-driven architecture components throughout an enterprise,” said Shawn McAllister, CTO and CPO at Solace. “We are excited that the Kafka community is embracing the cutting-edge functionality Solace Event Portal for Apache Kafka brings to the table.”

Learn More 

• Connect with Solace for a personal demo at Current 2023, Booth 206, September 26-27, 2023
• Catch Jonathan Schabowsky, Field CTO at Solace, who will be presenting at a Current breakout session on September 27 at 10:30 am PT. Citing real-world examples, Jonathan will discuss practical strategies and tools required to optimize Kafka stream management practices, safeguard data pipelines and harness the full potential of real-time event-driven data
• Register for a webinar co-hosted by Solace and Forrester on Thursday October 26, 2023 entitled “Trends and Considerations for using Kafka in the Enterprise”, featuring David Mooter, Senior Analyst at Forrester, who will discuss some of the fundamentals of Kafka, the most typical use cases and the common challenges organizations face when using Kafka-based brokers for streaming and event-driven systems