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The context for this inquiry is a close partner/supplier who uses Kafka as a message broker, and they have a desire to use it to send and recieve event information for events that should be mirrored in their ITSMs and our Assyst without also having to set up a Kafka REST Proxy unless absolutely necessary.

AssystETM utilizes ActiveMQ as its message bus and can be set up to consume messages from other ActiveMQ message buses than the dedicated assyst one. However, a pull based message broker such as kafka does not seem to be mentioned in the wiki.

I don’t have high hopes this is possible out of the box as of now, and it sounds ill-advised for us to try adding a Kafka client OSGi bundle to IPaaS ourselves😅. That being said, is this something that has been tested or done before, or is native support for using Kafka or another message broker something that is in the works or has been considered?

Native support for Kafka sounds like something that could be a common use case, and therefore possibly already being worked on, hence this question to get a general overview. 

Kafka support looks like it would be relatively straightforward to add - it’s part of Apache Camel which underpins ETM. However it would require product changes (to add new Channel sources and Mapper types to consume & produce messages respectively).

Please log an Idea, and if it garners support it may be added in a future release.

In the interim, it looks like it might be possible to use the Kafka JMS Connector to bridge messages between Kafka and ActiveMQ. ETM 1.11 will upgrade the version of the AMQ (classic) client to 6.1.5 (at least) which may be required to use a mutually compatible version of AMQ. 

Thank you very much for the quick reply! 

I will certainly have a look at the Kafka JMS Connector approach, this I had not considered.  
I’ve added an idea for kafka support, as well as added another use case.

I hope other members of the community will see the value and add their support alongside any other use cases

 

Thanks again 😊

The JMS connector I mentioned before is commercially licensed. An open source alternative is JMS | Lenses Docs.

I created a POC AMQ↔Kafka Docker setup (with AI help) which is attached - messages can be sent to AMQ via Kafka & vice versa. The messages that appear in AMQ seem to be empty for some reason, but this is surely fixable.

Thank you very much!
This is very interesting, and something we might have to look into at a later date. 😊
However, the use of custom, untested setups (which presumably would fall outside of support) is currently outside the scope of what we can pursue, given the cost-benefit of implementing and maintaining it with the current capacity of our Assyst admin team. 😅
It’s however very reassuring to know that if push comes to shove then it likely technically possible to implement such a workaround, even if it’s not added as a native part of the ETM/IPaaS released application.

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