On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Gwen Shapira <gshap...@cloudera.com> wrote: > Hi Kafka Fans, > > If you have one topic named "kafka_lab_2" and the other named > "kafka.lab.2", the topic level metrics will be named kafka_lab_2 for > both, effectively making it impossible to monitor them properly. > > The reason this happens is that using "." in topic names is pretty > common, especially as a way to group topics into data centers, > relevant apps, etc - basically a work-around to our current lack of > name spaces. However, most metric monitoring systems using "." to > annotate hierarchy, so to avoid issues around metric names, Kafka > replaces the "." in the name with an underscore. > > This generates good metric names, but creates the problem with name > collisions. > > I'm wondering if it makes sense to simply limit the range of > characters permitted in a topic name and disallow "_"? Obviously > existing topics will need to remain as is, which is a bit awkward.
Interesting problem! Many if not most users I personally am aware of use "_" as a separator in topic names. I am sure that many users would be quite surprised by this limitation. With that said, I am sure they'd transition accordingly. > > If anyone has better backward-compatible solutions to this, I'm all ears :) > > Gwen
