We hope you are having a great start of the year! We’re kicking off 2025 with powerful updates designed to help you manage data in Kafka with more clarity and precision. This release introduces our Chargeback capability, which allows you to easily assign Kafka costs to teams, departments, or projects based on their data usage.

We are also revamping our Kafka alerts system to give teams the control they need to resolve incidents before they disrupt operations, and launching Partner Zones—our new UI to create and manage isolated environments to share Kafka data securely with external partners, without the need for data duplication.

Let’s look at these new capabilities in more detail.

End Kafka Cost Confusion with Chargeback

Managing Kafka infrastructure without cost accountability is a recipe for wasted resources and budget overruns. Teams often end up with hidden expenses—idle partitions, uncontrolled resource usage—without any visibility into the ‘why’ or ‘who.’

Our new Chargeback functionality solves this problem by assigning Kafka resource costs to specific teams, departments, or projects based on actual data usage. Now, you can:

• Accurately track Kafka costs and allocate them where they belong.

• Improve forecasting and budgeting with real-time cost visibility.

• Drive cost-conscious decisions without sacrificing performance.

Kafka can be a strategic asset, but only if you control its financial footprint. Chargeback is now available for Conduktor Scale customers on the Plus tier. If you want to explore this feature further, let us know here.

Reimagining Alerts and Notifications for Kafka

As Kafka becomes central to modern data integration, organizations need a robust alerting and notification system to keep pace. The new system ensures Ops and Platform teams can track infrastructure health and resource usage, and developers receive alerts on application behaviour—delivering the right insights to the right people instantly.

What’s new?

• Granular Ownership: Alerts can now be owned by specific users, teams, or applications—no more “one-size-fits-all” chaos.

• Expanded Integrations: Get notified where it matters with support for Slack, Teams, and Webhooks, fully customisable per team.

• Event-Driven Notifications: Stay ahead of Kafka changes with alerts triggered by events like consumer group state changes, topic updates, or audit events.

• Self-Service Capabilities: End-users can configure alerts themselves, eliminating admin bottlenecks while keeping security controls in place.

This new system puts the right information in the right hands—faster. Expect better operational efficiency, faster response times, and broader adoption across teams. Learn about how our new alerting works in this blog post.

Partner Zones: Share Kafka Data Securely Without Duplication or Operational Hassle

Traditionally, sharing streaming data externally meant duplicating Kafka topics across as many physical clusters as the number of partners we want to collaborate with—an expensive, complex to maintain, and resource-heavy process. Partner Zones eliminate this burden, enabling seamless data sharing without replication or additional infrastructure.

• Safe space for each partner in dedicated Partner Zones with strict access controls.

• Define permissions for Kafka topics to ensure secure, controlled sharing.

• Monitor real-time activity with usage stats and audit logs.

• Enforce security policies with encryption, tokenisation, and masking.

With Partner Zones, organisations can easily define and control what they share with each partner without unnecessary duplication or operational hassle. Improve external collaboration and open new opportunities to monetize your real-time data, while maintaining strict security and control.

This new capability is available as part of Conduktor Exchange. If you are interested in a more cost-effective way of exchanging Kafka data with partners, find some time to talk to us.

We’re committed to making Kafka easier to manage at scale. Let’s make 2025 the year of turning streaming data into a strategic advantage!

For a full list please read the change log.