Kubesense

Data Streams

Data Streams is an upcoming feature. The functionality described below reflects the planned capabilities.

Data Streams provides end-to-end visibility into asynchronous data pipelines, helping you monitor message queues, streaming platforms, and event-driven architectures.

Overview

Modern applications increasingly rely on asynchronous messaging systems like Kafka, RabbitMQ, and cloud-native event buses. Data Streams helps you:

  • Track message flow — Visualize how data moves through your pipeline from producers to consumers
  • Measure end-to-end latency — Understand the total time from message production to consumption
  • Detect bottlenecks — Identify slow consumers, lagging partitions, and throughput bottlenecks
  • Monitor queue health — Track queue depth, consumer lag, and processing rates

Key Concepts

Pipeline

A data pipeline represents the path a message takes from producer to consumer, potentially through multiple intermediate stages (e.g., Producer → Kafka → Consumer → Database).

Latency Breakdown

End-to-end latency is broken down into stages:

  • Produce latency — Time for the producer to send the message
  • Queue latency — Time the message sits in the queue waiting to be consumed
  • Consume latency — Time for the consumer to process the message

Throughput

Message throughput measured at each stage of the pipeline.

Planned Capabilities

Pipeline Map

Visual topology showing data flow through your messaging infrastructure:

  • Producers and consumers as nodes
  • Queues/topics as intermediate nodes
  • Edge labels showing throughput and latency

Stream Metrics

MetricDescription
Messages/secMessage throughput at each pipeline stage
End-to-end latencyTotal time from production to consumption
Consumer lagNumber of messages waiting to be processed
Error rateFailed message processing rate
Queue depthCurrent number of messages in the queue

Supported Platforms

  • Apache Kafka — Topics, partitions, consumer groups
  • RabbitMQ — Queues, exchanges, bindings
  • AWS SQS/SNS — Queue metrics and message tracing
  • Google Pub/Sub — Topic and subscription monitoring
  • Redis Streams — Stream length and consumer group lag

Alerting

Set alerts on critical pipeline metrics:

  • Consumer lag exceeding thresholds
  • End-to-end latency spikes
  • Message processing failures
  • Queue depth anomalies

Getting Started

Data Streams will be accessible from the Data Streams item in the sidebar once the feature is generally available. Stay tuned for updates.