Format and structure Kafka messages with headers. Fast, secure, and completely free. All processing happens in your browser — no data is sent to any server.
A Kafka Message Formatter takes a raw Kafka message payload — often JSON, Avro-decoded output, or plain text pulled from a console consumer — and renders it in a structured, readable layout alongside its key, headers, and metadata like partition and offset when available. Messages captured with kafka-console-consumer or a UI tool's raw export are typically dumped as compact, single-line text with no visual separation between the key, value, and headers, which makes debugging a specific message's content harder than it needs to be.
Debugging a Kafka consumer issue usually starts with looking at an actual message that caused a problem — a poison message that crashes a consumer, an unexpected null field, a header your code didn't account for. Console tools dump that message as one dense block of text with the key, headers, and value all mashed together, and this formatter turns that into something you can actually scan for the specific field or header value you're chasing down.
No, it works with plain text and JSON payloads — binary-serialized formats like Avro or Protobuf need to be decoded to text first (typically with your schema registry tooling) before pasting them in for formatting.
Yes, paste the headers along with the key and value, and each is displayed as a clearly labeled, separate section rather than run together.
No, it only formats text you paste in manually — it doesn't connect to any broker, topic, or cluster, so there's no configuration or credentials required.
Plain text values are displayed as-is; the automatic pretty-printing specifically applies when the value is detected as valid JSON.
No, all formatting happens locally in your browser, which matters since Kafka messages often contain real internal business data.