What is the best way to health check a kafka connection from within an producer java application

[Vijaya Narayanan Paul]

I am working on a kafka producer application that needs to know when kafka goes down. I am looking for some kind of health check option thru which i can frequently poll and alert the system about kafka failure.

[gerard...@dizzit.com]

I think the best way is to have some kind of hartbeat topic running, and expect every x time to get an event from it. Then you handle al possible errors. Another option is to monitor the broker with jmx, and set a trigger on produce failed and/or when you lose connection.