Introduction

BROKA is a self-hosted operations console for message brokers. One workspace holds every broker you run, with one set of environments, one permission model and one audit trail across all of them — while each broker keeps the depth its own operators expect.

This section takes you from nothing to a connected broker you can actually work in. Everything after it is reference: what each screen shows and what each control does.

What you need before you start

A machine that can run containers. Nothing else is required: PostgreSQL comes with the Compose file as one of the four containers, there is no agent to install on your brokers, and no change to make to them.

BROKA connects outward, and only outward. It reads your brokers over their own management interfaces using credentials you give it. It is not a proxy, it does not sit in the path your messages take, and nothing about your brokers has to be reconfigured to be managed by it.

The order this section goes in

1. Product concepts — the four words the rest of the documentation is written in: environment, connection, resource and team. Reading this first makes everything after it shorter.
2. Initial setup — the first-run screen, where the first administrator account is created.
3. Connect your first broker — registering a broker, testing it before saving, and what happens when the test fails.
4. User and team setup — adding the people who will use it, and scoping what they can do.

What edition you are running

Community is Apache Kafka in full depth, plus any broker that speaks the Kafka protocol, with no licence key. Commercial adds Redis, RabbitMQ, Apache Artemis (formerly ActiveMQ Artemis) and Memcached, forwarding the audit trail to Kafka or RabbitMQ, and four governance features: Applications, Access Review, recording reads in the audit trail, and Slack, Microsoft Teams and webhook alert channels. Guardrails, scoped roles, the audit trail of every write and every refusal, alerting and e-mail are in both.

The boundary is in the images rather than in a setting: a community build does not contain the code for the commercial platforms or for those features, so there is nothing to enable and nothing to unlock. All three images — the console, the orchestrator and the broker service — come in both editions, so upgrading means pulling the commercial three and then activating your licence. The images decide what exists; the licence decides how long it keeps working.

Every page in this documentation carries the editions it applies to in its own header line, beside the date and the version, and a Commercial part of a shared page says so where it starts.

A note on what this documentation does not do

It describes what the product does today, on the version named at the top of each page. Where a screen cannot do something — because the broker's own API does not expose it, or because we have not built it — the page says so, in the place you would have looked for it.