Monitoring helps provide assurances that all your services are working properly, meeting SLAs, and addressing business needs. When monitoring a Kafka deployment in real-time, it's essential to focus on what the business cares about, such as application-level visibility, stream latency, consumer group membership, partition assignment, message delivery statistics, and performance bottlenecks. A common pitfall of generic monitoring tools is that they import all available metrics from various systems into a metrics swamp, which cannot produce valuable insight without Kafka context or expertise to determine important metrics. Instead, a domain-specific monitoring solution designed for Kafka is necessary to provide real-time visibility into the wellbeing of the Kafka deployment and identify critical issues. Confluent Control Center provides real-time monitoring capabilities, including stream latency, consumer group membership, partition assignment, message delivery statistics, and performance bottlenecks, with features such as end-to-end stream monitoring, stream delivery, and request lifecycle analysis. It also inherits performance and scalability improvements from Kafka, provides a 2-for-1 efficiency in operations, offers a unified security configuration experience, and supports enterprise-level support through the Confluent subscription.