We are in the process of migrating the pieces of automation that currently reads and modifies zookeeper state to use the Admin API.
One of the things that we miss doing this is access to the start time of brokers in a cluster which is used by our automation doing rolling restarts. We currently read this from the timestamp field from the epehmeral broker znodes in zookeeper. To address this limitation, I have authored KIP-536, that proposes adding a timestamp field to the Node class that the AdminClient.describeCluster() method returns. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-536%3A+Propagate+broker+timestamp+to+Admin+API <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-536:+Propagate+broker+timestamp+to+Admin+API> Any and all feedback is most welcome cheers noa
