What are the system requirements?

Railway handles all the infrastructure requirements. You only need a web browser to deploy and manage your application.

Is this template free to use?

Yes, this template is free to use within your existing Railway account.

Can I customize this template?

Yes, you can fully customize this template. After deployment, you will have full control of what you've deployed in your Railway project.

How do I get support for this template?

You can get support through our community forum: kafka-kafbat-ui-kafka-prometheus-exp-9f521fbe, or join our Discord community for more assistance.

Deploy and Host Kafka + Kafbat UI + Kafka Prometheus Exporter on Railway

Apache Kafka – the event-streaming platform (brokers, topics, partitions, producers/consumers).
Kafbat UI – a free, open-source web UI to browse/manage clusters (see brokers, topics, partitions, consumer groups, messages, ACLs, etc.). Think “Kafka control panel.”
Kafka Prometheus Exporter – a small service exposing Prometheus-readable metrics about Kafka (topic/partition counts, consumer-group lag, etc.). Prometheus scrapes it; Grafana (optional) visualizes. (Often used alongside or instead of the JMX Exporter that pulls Kafka’s JMX MBeans.)

About Hosting Kafka + Kafbat UI + Kafka Prometheus Exporter

Hosting Kafka with Kafbat UI and the Kafka Prometheus Exporter involves provisioning reliable compute, fast disks, and stable networking for brokers (preferably multiple nodes). Configure Kafka (KRaft or ZooKeeper), listeners/advertised addresses, replication factors, and retention. Expose secure endpoints (TLS/SASL), create ACLs, and size partitions for throughput. Deploy Kafbat UI pointing at the cluster for topic/consumer management. Run the Kafka Prometheus Exporter (or JMX exporter) to expose metrics; have Prometheus scrape it and, optionally, Grafana visualize dashboards and alerts. Add log aggregation, backup/snapshot routines, rolling upgrade procedures, and capacity planning. Automate via Docker Compose or Kubernetes manifests, with IaC (e.g., Terraform) for repeatable, versioned environments.

Common Use Cases

E-commerce orders & payments: Kafka carries events for cart, checkout, payment, shipment. Services consume to reserve inventory, send emails, and update CRM. Kafbat UI helps ops inspect topics and consumer groups during spikes; Exporter surfaces lag/URPs so Prometheus alerts before SLAs slip.
IoT/telemetry ingestion: Devices stream sensor readings to Kafka. Stream processors aggregate and detect anomalies; a data sink persists to a warehouse/lake. Kafbat UI verifies partition keys and message rates; Exporter tracks broker health and per-topic throughput for capacity planning.
App logs & clickstream analytics: Web/app events flow into Kafka, then to Flink/Spark and OLAP stores for dashboards and growth experiments. Kafbat UI enables safe topic management and message replay; Exporter powers alerts on consumer lag, retention pressure, and disk usage.

Dependencies for Kafka + Kafbat UI + Kafka Prometheus Exporter Hosting

Deployment Dependencies

The template relies on the following docker image, please visit the following links for further documentation.

Why Deploy Kafka + Kafbat UI + Kafka Prometheus Exporter on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying Kafka + Kafbat UI + Kafka Prometheus Exporter on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.