What do I do when I have connection issues on Conduktor Desktop?

Your Kafka cluster is up, you're signed into Conduktor Desktop but you can't connect to your Kafka cluster, why and what can you do?

The error

You may have an error which reads something like:

“It looks like [Your-kafka-broker:9092] is not even accessible, check if the broker is up and its port opened.”

or

"The broker [your-kafka-broker:9092] is reachable but Kafka can't connect. 
Ensure you have access to the advertised listeners of the cluster and the proper authorizations."

Why does this happen?

First things first, the majority of this information is taken from our own Kafkademy website, which provides resources on learning Kafka for free, see here. In short when attempting to connect a client(producer or consumer) to a Kafka cluster you need two things to happen:

1. Initial connection to Kafka broker (bootstrap broker). This returns information including a list of all the brokers in the cluster and their connection endpoints.
2. The client then connects to the Kafka brokers returned in the first step.

However, if the broker has not been configured correctly, the connections will fail. If the Advertised Host IP is in the same network as the Kafka client, it will connect fine, otherwise, the connection will fail, i.e. the advertised listeners must be reachable from your machine directly.

Figure 1: Connection Establishment

What steps can you take to solve this problem?

1. Ensure the Kafka broker you are attempting to connect to is in fact up and running.
2. Please ensure you are connected to your company's VPN to this before using Conduktor, in order to connect to your Kafka network (This is so Conduktor is able to find your Kafka brokers).
3. Speak with your colleagues who are able to get connected to make sure configurations settings are ok
4. Lastly, discuss with your Kafka administration team to make sure you have the right access to it.