Webpage Behavior Analysis
Kafka clusters process website activities (PV, search, etc.) in real time and publish them to topics by type. These information flows can be used for real-time monitoring or offline statistical analysis.
A large amount of activity information is generated in each user's PV, therefore, website activity tracking requires high throughput. Kafka clusters perfectly meet the requirements of high throughput and offline processing.
Log Aggregation
Kafka clusters feature low-latency processing, supporting multiple data sources and distributed data processing (consumption). Compared with centralized log aggregation systems, Kafka provides better persistence and lower end-to-end latency while delivering the same performance.
The above features make Kafka clusters an ideal log collection center. Multiple servers/applications can asynchronously send operation logs in batches to Kafka clusters instead of saving them locally or in a DB. Kafka clusters can submit/compress messages in batches, and producers can hardly perceive the performance overhead. Consumers can use systematic storage and analysis systems such as Hadoop to analyze the pulled logs.
Online/Offline Analysis
In some big data scenarios, a large amount of concurrent data needs to be processed and aggregated. This requires clusters to have excellent processing performance and high scalability. Moreover, Kafka clusters’ data distribution mechanism, in terms of disk space allocation, message format processing, server selection, and data compression, also makes them suitable for handling high numbers of real-time messages and aggregating distributed application data, which facilitates system OPS.
Kafka clusters can better aggregate, process, and analyze offline and streaming data.