Simulating Kafka being down

[Omar Othman <om...@gmail.com>]

Hi All,

We depend on Kafka a lot in my company and one of the projects we wanted to
do is writing all the logs from SysLog to Kafka via "omkafka" module
<http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/master/configuration/modules/omkafka.html> that
rsyslogd provides.

We enabled that once and, because of some rsyslogd sending-to-Kafka
internals, Kafka's failure (due to whatever reason) caused problems
throughout the infrastructure.

After solving the issues with sending to Kafka, I want to enable this
feature again, but cautiously of course... since it is an
infrastructure-wide change.

For that, I need to simulate Kafka being down.

Of course I can just kill the process or shutdown the machine or whatever,
but this is actually a shared cluster. So I was wondering if it is a nice
feature to be able to "bring down a topic". In other words, getting Kafka
to lock writing for a certain topic for some time, and thus rejecting any
incoming write request.

If this is the wrong channel for a feature request, please let me know
where to forward that.

-- 
Best Regards,

*Omar Othman*