KP

Kyriakos P.

Software Architect

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

8/28/2020

"Lenses for understanding Kafka"

5/5

What do you like best about Lenses?

Lenses provides a quick inside view of all you data flow.

It has helped our junior team coming from an SQL background to understand Kafka and its streaming nature much faster flattening the learning curve.

Personally, I love the support. Especially through slack the response is very quick and hands on. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

There is not much to dislike. Lenses provides us an inside view of our streaming data in a way we could not do before. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Lenses:

Start off with the Docker Box installation to play around and join Slack. Once anyone gets a first feel of the product he/she will be impressed. Easy to use and very insightful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

Lenses helps us create proof of concepts quickly using the SQL Processors and also we use it as a Kafka training tool for our engineers that haven't used Kafka in the past. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

UT

Verified User in Transportation/Trucking/Railroad

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

6/26/2020

"Powerful tool for increased productivity"

5/5

What do you like best about Lenses?

Lenses is an intuitive tool that provides great observability and management features for our streaming environment. It has some very useful interfaces for managing and querying Kafka topics. Lenses has proven to increase productivity in our environment by enabling developers to more quickly ascertain state. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

In the current release (3.2.1), some types of Kafka consumers (e.g. Apache Flink) appear as "inactive" even though they are active. This is not a "showstopper", but it could be confusing to some users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Lenses:

Download the Lenses Box and run it locally to see all the features in action. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

Lenses is helping us more quickly iterate on our streaming-related projects. It provides a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use interface that helps our developers troubleshoot Kafka-related issues. Additionally, it has been invaluable in helping us design our partitioning strategies, as well as capacity plan. Furthermore, it provides us with the means to easily query billions of IoT messages to troubleshoot devices in the field. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

DF

Donny F.

Data Engineer/Architect

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

6/10/2020

"A very respectable add-on for the enterprise-grade Kafka cluster!"

5/5

What do you like best about Lenses?

The view into the data in our Kafka topics, the ability to "scan through" the records in a topic and query it for troubleshooting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

There's no free/open version (but there is a trial version and local developer version). This makes the adoption curve a bit steep for small-scale deployments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Lenses:

Try the Lenses Box docker image locally. This image can also works as a general and lightweight Kafka development environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're using Lenses to enable our developers to effectively adopt and work with Kafka. The security features and data protection policies paves the way for a wide user base. Finally, the people behind Lenses (Landoop) are great to work with! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

MG

Michael G.

Principal Engineer

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

7/27/2020

"Invaluable tool for anyone using Kafka"

5/5

What do you like best about Lenses?

A great way to sample and query data in a GUI. We didn't have a reliable way to do that before. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

Producing messages within Lenses seems to require that messages already exist on the topic, and if you use Avro, it will only use one schema for that topic. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

AF

Verified User in Financial Services

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

6/9/2020

"Lenses is one of those tools that when you get accustomed to you really can't live without."

4.5/5

What do you like best about Lenses?

The ability to quickly filter the messages inside the Kafka topics by SQL.

P.S: the autocompletion suggestions are invaluable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

The fact that the SQL view to filter the topics messages only works with websockets enabled. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Lenses:

Lenses is a great product made by great people.

The Lenses team is incredibly skilled and always ready to help in case of any kind of issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

I solve a tons of problems with Lenses! Introspection all around! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

GF

George F.

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

6/9/2020

"Very complete tool to browse and understand what's happening inside your clusters"

5/5

What do you like best about Lenses?

Topologies, UX and how easy is to use #awesome Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

Lack of features regarding protobuf #proto Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

AH

Verified User in Human Resources

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

6/9/2020

"lenses, a kafka story"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Lenses?

I like the custom serde ability and lenses sql. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

buggy with configs, bugs in LSQL, VERY weird bash script for docker image env vars. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.