Introducing the Next Generation of Control Center for Confluent Platform: Enhanced UX, Faster Performance, and Unparalleled Scale

We're excited to announce the release of the next generation of Control Center for Confluent Platform, which delivers higher partition limits, faster spin-up time, metrics freshness, and simpler operational overhead.

Confluent introduced Confluent Control Center in 2016 as part of Confluent Platform, simplifying Apache Kafka® operations and delivering end-to-end visibility into data pipelines. The original version prioritized ease of use, featuring a graphical user interface for Kafka Connect configuration and robust stream monitoring to ensure reliable message delivery.

Today’s improvements are a massive step toward delivering a next-generation user experience (UX), with faster performance and unparalleled scale.

What’s New?

Confluent Control Center 2.0 marks a significant evolution in Kafka management by offering unmatched performance, limitless scalability, and enhanced operational simplicity. This next-generation solution empowers operators, developers, and architects to oversee Kafka deployments with greater efficiency, confidence, and ease.

With the next generation of Control Center, Kafka admins and developers can:

• Scale without limits, with up to 400K partitions supported, including replication (more than 3x the previous limit of 120K partitions)

• Accelerate start-up time to just 1 minute, down from 15–50 minutes, enabling faster recovery and reduced downtime

• Achieve end-to-end metrics freshness within 2–3 minutes, cutting latency by more than 50% compared to previous delays of 5+ minutes

• Reduce operational overhead and simplify their architecture by eliminating the need for a separate Kafka cluster to store metrics

"The new Control Center release is a breath of fresh air! The UI now glides effortlessly, making it a joy to navigate and monitor our Kafka infrastructure. The lightning-fast service start-up and restart times are a game-changer, transforming what used to be a tedious process into a seamless experience. This release has truly elevated Confluent Control Center to a new level of performance and usability."

— ABANCA Team

Scale Vast Data Workloads With a New Prometheus Architecture

To continue evolving our monitoring capabilities and reach higher performance and scalability, Control Center has been rearchitected to integrate with Prometheus alongside Confluent Telemetry Reporter, which facilitates ingestion into the Prometheus open telemetry protocol (OTLP) endpoint. This industry-leading open source monitoring system is designed for managing metrics in dynamic environments by gathering data from endpoints, storing metrics as time-series data, and facilitating advanced analysis.

This new architecture optimizes the ability to efficiently handle large numbers of topics and consumer groups, ensuring seamless performance in complex Kafka workloads. With Prometheus, Confluent Platform users can now support up to 400K partitions, including replication, compared to the previous limit of 120K partitions. We’ve also removed the need for another Kafka cluster for metrics storage—significantly alleviating costs and simplifying operations.

Get Started Today

The next generation of Control Center will be fully backward compatible through Confluent Platform version 7.5. Users deploying Confluent Platform versions 7.5–7.9 can seamlessly use the latest features and enhancements in Control Center to monitor their deployments without any data plane upgrades.

Experience the future of Kafka management firsthand with Confluent Control Center 2.0. It will be included in Confluent Platform and accessible through Confluent Cloud. Confluent Platform users can refer to the release notes for upgrade instructions, while Confluent Cloud users will automatically gain access to the new features when they log in. Explore our comprehensive documentation and step-by-step tutorials to get started.

What’s Next?

Coming in Summer 2025, Confluent Platform 8.0 will be built on Apache Kafka 4.0, and the Apache Kafka community will be removing support for certain legacy clients, including Zookeeper. Moving forward, clients must use Apache Kafka 2.1 or newer. Apache Kafka 3.7 (released February 2024) has already marked these legacy API versions as deprecated. Please see KIP-896 for details on the client versions that will be deprecated.

We will update documentation and tooling for analyzing logs to help you identify clients that are using deprecated versions and navigate updating clients to compliant and stable versions. Our Professional Services team can work with you to migrate from deprecated clients to compliant, stable, and performant clients. In the meantime, please reach out to your account team if you have any questions.

We’re continuously evolving our data streaming capabilities for on-premises and hybrid workloads. We’re working on a UI for Confluent Platform for Apache Flink® and new ways to unify management and monitoring across cloud and on-prem. Stay tuned for more exciting updates to Confluent Platform in the coming months!

Download the latest version of Confluent Platform today to get started with the only cloud-native and comprehensive data streaming platform, built by the original co-creators of Apache Kafka®.

The preceding outlines our general product direction and is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described may change. Customers should make their purchase decisions based on services, features, and functions that are currently available.

Confluent and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Confluent, Inc.

Apache®, Apache Flink®, Apache Kafka®, Kafka®, Flink®, and the Kafka and Flink logos are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.