The Pulsar UI Comparison Guide: The Best Tools for Monitoring and Management of Apache Pulsar

Managing Apache Pulsar clusters through traditional command-line interfaces (CLIs) can often be complex, error-prone and time-consuming. Fortunately, there are several graphical user interfaces (UIs) designed to simplify this process, offering a powerful and intuitive way to interact with Pulsar clusters making monitoring, managing, and optimizing Pulsar far more accessible.

What are the best tools to observe data flows, observe key metrics and troubleshoot issues in Apache Pulsar? This article provides an overview of key criteria for choosing a UI, as well as an in-depth comparison of the most prominent tools, including Apache Pulsar Manager, Streamvisor, DataStax Pulsar Admin Console and Redisant Pulsar Assistant.

Why chose a Pulsar UI over the Pulsar CLI?

• Convenience: Pulsar UIs offer user-friendly interfaces that simplify cluster management, making it easy to interact with topics, namespaces, tenants and key metrics without relying on complex CLI commands that produce verbose output, making readability suffer.
• Scalability: Querying and observing many Pulsar resources from the CLI is difficult. In contrast, most UI tools allow you to get a quick overview of what is going on and can manage multiple Pulsar clusters simultaneously.
• Powerful Insights: Advanced features like metrics visualization, including subscription, production, and consumption monitoring, are commonly available. Some UIs even support message browsing and filtering, giving you deeper insights into your data flows and cluster performance.

Key criteria for choosing a Pulsar UI

To determine the best Pulsar UI for your needs, it’s essential to evaluate each option based on several critical aspects:

• User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI): How intuitive and easy to use is the UI?
• Monitoring & Management:
  • Tenant/Namespace/Topic Monitoring: How effectively can you monitor and manage different cluster resources?
  • Schema Support: Does the tool support schema display in different types?
  • Message Viewing and Production Capabilities: Can you view, filter, and produce messages directly from the UI? Is message deserialization supported?
• Security Features: How robust are the authentication and authorization mechanisms?
• Maintenance and Deployment Options: Is the tool up-to-date with recent Pulsar versions? How easy can you deploy it to your environment?

With the key criteria defined, let's take a look at the pros and cons of each of these tools.

Apache Pulsar Manager

Apache Pulsar Manager is a free and open-source web user interface designed to simplify the management of Apache Pulsar clusters. It provides a visual interface for managing tenants, namespaces, and topics, while also offering metrics on message throughput and broker internals.

Pros

• User Interface: Simple and clean interface, only the navigation down to the topic level is a little cumbersome. Accessible for both beginners as well as experiences users.
• Monitoring & Management: Pulsar Manager provides many metrics, including insights into the state of Pulsar internals like bundles and ledgers.
• Open Source: Being open source means Pulsar Manager allows your team to modify and extend the tool to meet your requirements, if necessary.
• Deployment: Pulsar Manager can be deployed using Docker or the Apache Pulsar Helm chart, making it easy to install in Kubernetes environments.

Cons

• User Experience: While the UI offers a lot of information, the presentation is cluttered and the navigation between resources likes tenants, namespaces and topics is cumbersome.
• Monitoring & Management: Pulsar Manager lacks features for common operations like adding topic partitions. Furthermore, it does not allow viewing and managing topic schemas and does not provide insights into Pulsar producers. In terms of message viewing capabilities, it is very limited, making troubleshooting difficult because users have to rely on external tools to analyze and filter message data. Message production is not supported by Pulsar Manager.
• Security: Security is a bit of an afterthought in Pulsar Manager as it only provides a single user account granting admin access to all resources. Without the ability to have multiple users and a robust role-based access control (RBAC), managing a production environment becomes difficult, especially in enterprise settings.
• Maintenance & Deployment: Pulsar Manager suffers from a lack of maintenance and updates, raising concerns about its long-term viability. Without regular updates or bug fixes, the tool is becoming unstable and might be prone to security issues as well. Another issue is the lack of an ARM-compatible Docker image, posing challenges particularly in edge or IoT environments. Furthermore, Pulsar Manager does not offer true multi-environment capabilities, as all its internal connections share the same configuration. This limitation requires separate deployments on every environment and thus increases operational effort.

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Streamvisor

Streamvisor is a web-based Pulsar UI designed by Pulsar experts, offering an enhanced, user-friendly approach to managing and monitoring. With both a free version and a paid enterprise-grade version, Streamvisor is particularly well-suited for production Pulsar environments where other UIs might not suffice.

Pros

• User Interface & Experience: Streamvisor has a modern and easy-to-use interface designed to provide the most important information at all times, while still keeping more advanced operations available for when you need them.
• Monitoring & Management: Streamvisor provides very good monitoring and management capabilities, ranging from common operations like changing topic partitions and unloading topics, to providing insights into subscriptions, consumers and producers. It also allows for viewing and managing topic schemas, improving data governance and data consistency. In addition, it gives users the option to get a filtered live-view of messages that can automatically deserialize messages according to their schema information. Producing messages in the same way is also possible. Besides the option to interact directly with the UI, Streamvisor also features Service Accounts for integration into automated environments like CI pipelines or GitOps processes.
• Security: Streamvisor excels with robust security features such as a fine-grained RBAC permission model or integration with an identity provider (IdP) for Single Sign-On (SSO). It's active maintenance also prevents being at risk of vulnerabilities by outdated software dependencies.
• Maintenance & Deployment: Streamvisor is actively maintained and updated by Pulsar experts making it a good choice for enterprise environments. It also includes deployment options using Docker or a Helm chart for deployment on Kubernetes that is optimized to also work in RedHat OpenShift environments.

Cons

• Monitoring & Management: At this point in time, Streamvisor does not provide very detailed insights into Pulsar storage internals or features like managing Pulsar IO connectors. However, this is subject to change in the future.
• Cost: While the free version offers a lot in terms of monitoring and management, some of Streamvisor's advanced features like RBAC, SSO, or Service Accounts are only available in the paid enterprise version.

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DataStax Pulsar Admin Console

The DataStax Pulsar Admin Console is another web-based user interface that provides management capabilities for Apache Pulsar. It simplifies the administration, enabling users to efficiently manage essentials resources such as tenants, namespaces and topics. It is developed by DataStax.

Pros

• User Interface & User Experience: The user interface is designed in a very sleek dark grey and blue theme. A nice detail for Pulsar beginners is the dashboard providing small example snippets on how to connect to brokers and a collection of code snippets for basic operations.
• Monitoring & Management: In terms of monitoring and management capabilities, the DataStax Pulsar Admin Console offers a lot of features. Besides providing insights into key metrics for topics it also allows users to manage Pulsar functions and Pulsar IO connectors. It also allows you to change the runtime configuration options of your Pulsar brokers.
• Open Source: As the project is open source it allows you to take the code and modify it meet your requirements, if this is necessary.
• Deployment: The DataStax Pulsar Admin Console can be deployed using Docker or the DataStax Pulsar Helm Chart in Kubernetes environments.

Cons

• User Interface & User Experience: While the user interface seems to offer many features, the DataStax Pulsar Admin Console suffers from bugs where some of the just don't work. Furthermore, the UI can be overwhelming by showing too much information at once.
• Monitoring & Management: A drawback of the DataStax Pulsar Admin Console is that just like Pulsar Manager, it does not support viewing and managing topic schemas. It also does not offer insights into Pulsar producers and lacks some key features like re-partitioning topics. Most importantly, it has very limited capabilities for viewing and producing messages, especially for topics with schemas, making it not a good choice in real-world scenarios.
• Security: In terms of security, the DataStax Pulsar Admin Console is lacking some key features for production usage like role-based access control (RBAC). Furthermore, the project is not actively maintained so it might suffer vulnerabilities from outdated software libraries.
• Maintenance & Deployment: The DataStax Pulsar Admin Console suffers from a lack of maintenance and updates, raising concerns about its long-term viability. Without regular updates or bug fixes, the tool might be prone to security issues. Furthermore, even though it is possible to deploy it using the DataStax Pulsar Helm Chart, the Helm chart itself is using an outdated version of Apache Pulsar. Other issues include the the lack of an ARM-compatible Docker image, as well as a complicated configuration. The tool does not support multi-environment connections, thus requiring separate deployments on every environment and and increased operational effort.

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Redisant Pulsar Assistant

The Pulsar Assistant by Redisant is a desktop application for Pulsar management and visualization. It offers a free evaluation but after that costs money to use.

Pros

• Monitoring & Management: The Pulsar Assistant allows you to view detailed information about Pulsar resources, ranging from performance metrics to storage internals and policy information. Besides offering insights into consumers and producers, it also supports message production capabilities and a live view of messages that allows you to apply filters for easier debugging.
• Maintenance & Deployment: In contrast to the other tools in this comparison, the Pulsar Assistant is a native desktop app, which can be a benefit to some users.

Cons

• User Interface & User Experience: The Pulsar Assistant uses a directory-like structure to represent the Pulsar topology. While this is fine for smaller Pulsar clusters, it can become overwhelming to navigate large-scale topologies. Furthermore there is a lot of information on every part of the UI, making it cluttered and not very intuitive. This can make it difficult for users to quickly grasp the information they need. Lastly, some parts of the UI are not fully translated from Chinese to English, creating a problem for users who rely on English.
• Security: Pulsar Assistant does not have a user model, starting the application directly gives you full access to your Pulsar clusters. This absence of a user and permission model makes it less suitable for scenarios that go beyond simple local development.
• Maintenance & Deployment: Pulsar Assistant is limited by it's desktop-only application model which is restricting when working with cloud-native data platforms like Apache Pulsar. The absence of a web-based interface, along with no Docker image or Helm Chart for cloud deployments, makes it difficult for users to integrate Pulsar Assistant into modern, scalable cloud environments. Furthermore, although the UI is offered for all major operating systems, in our test it only worked on Microsoft Windows. This raises concerns about maintenance, especially as it is a paid application.

• Cost: The Redisant Pulsar Assistant is a paid application. To get a feel for the application, a short evaluation period is offered for free, after which the application does not work anymore.

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Summary: Comparing UIs to manage & monitor Apache Pulsar

This comparison discussed numerous features and to simplify things, the table below provides a summary of all the key points. Each category in the comparison is rated on a scale from 1 to 3, with 3 stars representing the maximum score.

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Conclusion

In this comparison, we reviewed several UI tools for managing Apache Pulsar, each with different strengths and weaknesses. In short, Redisant Pulsar Assistant is ideal for Windows users looking for a desktop application instead of cloud-native deployments whereas the DataStax Pulsar Admin Console is a good choice if you need to manage Pulsar functions and connectors. Finally, Streamvisor is a platform with strong enterprise focus and very few downsides. To choose most appropriate Pulsar UI, it is important to consider the specific requirements of your organization.

To learn more about Streamvisor, check out our documentation or head over to our blog. You can also try our free Streamvisor Community edition!

If you get stuck or have any Pulsar-related questions, you can contact us by filling out our contact form or joining our Slack Community.