What problem are you trying to solve?

HTTP based traffic is only one type of modern applications. Many use message queues such as Kafka. Getting the metrics for consumers/producers/messages are just as critical to application health as requests and responses in HTTP.

How should the problem be solved?

Implement a Kafka codec that allows the Linkerd proxy to introspect Kafka's protocol and provide metrics for the communications between consumers and producers. This should show up as a CLI command, dashboard and visualization of the topology between message consumers and HTTP actors.

Related Issues

• Parsing TCP traffic: redis, cassandra, ES, memcache, whatever's next #1779