Programmable Push Filters

You can use Redpanda Console’s programmable push filters to search for a specific record within a Kafka topic. Programmable push filters enable you to write a TypeScript/JavaScript function body that runs in the backend and is called for every individual Kafka record. The code has to return a boolean. If your code returns true, the backend sends the record to the frontend. Otherwise the record is skipped and Redpanda Console continues to consume records until the selected number of max search results has been reached or "the end" of the topic hit.

On a topic’s Messages page, select to enable Filter and click +.

Redpanda Console can inject the following properties into your function, which you can use in your filter code:

partitionId - The record’s partition ID
offset - The record’s offset within its partition
key - The record’s key in its decoded form
value - The record’s value in its decoded form
headers - The record’s header value in its decoded form

Keys, values, and headers are passed into your JavaScript code in their decoded form. That means that the deserialization logic (for example, decode an Avro serialized byte array to a JSON object) is applied first, before injecting it into the JavaScript function. If your record is presented as a JSON object in the UI, you can also access it like a JavaScript object in your filter code.

Suppose you have a series of Avro, JSON, or Protobuf encoded record values that deserialize to JSON objects like this:

{
    "event_type": "BASKET_ITEM_ADDED",
    "event_id": "777036dd-1bac-499c-993a-8cc86cee3ccc"
    "item": {
        "id": "895e443a-f1b7-4fe5-ad66-b9adfe5420b9",
        "name": "milk"
    }
}

return value.item.id == "895e443a-f1b7-4fe5-ad66-b9adfe5420b9"

When the filter function returns true, the record is sent to the front end. If you use more than one filter function at the same time, filters are combined with a logical AND, so records must pass every filter. The offset specified also is effectively combined using an AND operator.

Resource usage and performance

You can use Redpanda Console’s filter engine against topics with millions of records, as the filter code is evaluated in the backend where more resources are available. However, while the filter engine is fairly efficient, it could potentially consume all available CPU resources and cause significant network traffic due to the number of consumed Kafka records.

Usually, performance is constrained by available CPU resources. Depending on the JavaScript code and the records, the expected performance is around ~15k-20k filtered records per second for each available core. The request is only processed on a single instance and cannot be shared across multiple instances.