Comparison

Klag, Burrow, and KMinion all monitor Kafka consumer lag. They differ in what they measure and where they send it.

At a glance

	Klag	Burrow	KMinion
Runtime	Java / Vert.x / GraalVM	Go	Go
Primary output	Prometheus, Datadog, OTLP	HTTP API + notifiers	Prometheus
License	Apache 2.0	Apache 2.0	MIT

Feature comparison

Feature	Klag	Burrow	KMinion
Lag in messages	✅	✅	✅
Consumer group state	✅	✅	✅
Lag velocity (growing/shrinking)	✅	⚠️ status only	❌
AI agent endpoint (MCP)	✅	❌	❌
Time-based lag (seconds/minutes)	✅	❌	❌
Time-to-catch-up estimate	✅	❌	❌
Hot partition detection	✅	❌	❌
Data loss / retention alerting	✅	❌	❌
Lag status evaluation rules	❌	✅	❌
Built-in notifiers (email/Slack/HTTP)	❌	✅	❌
Broker / topic / log-dir metrics	⚠️ partial	❌	✅
Prometheus native	✅	⚠️ separate exporter	✅
Datadog / OTLP native	✅	❌	❌
Read-only ACLs (DESCRIBE only)	✅	✅	⚠️ writes for e2e
Helm chart	✅	community	community

Spotted something out of date? Burrow and KMinion both evolve. Open an issue or PR against website/ and we’ll fix it.