producer metadata behavior when topic not created

[Steven Wu <st...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I am talking about the 0.8.2 java producer.

In our deployment, we disables auto topic creation, because we would like
to control the precise number of partitions created for each topic and the
placement of partitions (e.g. zone-aware).

I did some experimentation and checked the code. metadata request to broker
(for non-exist topic) will got a successful response. should broker return
failure or partial failure if queried topic doesn't exist? can we add
metric at broker side for querying non-exist topics?

The net behavior is that there are more metadata queries from producer,
throttled by the backoff config (default is 100ms). can we add a metric for
metadata request and response rate? rate should normally be very low during
steady state, as default refresh interval is 5 mins.

basically, I am trying to detect this scenario (non-exist topic) and be
able to alert on some metrics. any other suggestions?

Thanks,
Steven