Turn off Confluent Telemetry Metrics which are being enabled automatically in Kafka Exporter Config?

Question

For some reason, the _confluent_telemetry_metrics gets automatically enabled. This happens even though Confluent Telemetry Reporter is turned off with telemetry.enabled=false. This is with Confluent Operator with Kubernetes on my laptop (Confluent Platform v6.0).

[INFO] 2020-12-01 07:21:41,923 [main] io.confluent.telemetry.exporter.kafka.KafkaExporterConfig logAll - KafkaExporterConfig values: 
    enabled = true
    topic.name = _confluent-telemetry-metrics
    topic.partitions = 12
    topic.replicas = 3

This results in boatloads of errors because it repeatedly tries to create that topic with 3 replicas even though Kafka is configured with only 1 replica.

How does one turn this off? I don't see this setting in Kafka's server.properties or in the Operator's values.yaml file. I searched in several places but wasn't able to find any documentation for this setting, or for Kafka Exporter Config (as in the log excerpt above). No answers on Confluent's Slack community either.

Thanks so much for any help you can provide!

Answer 1

I had exactly the same problem, and fall on this question. I know the question is old, but I've got a solution from Confluent support : You have to set confluent.reporters.telemetry.auto.enable to false to disable this topic feed. See https://docs.confluent.io/platform/current/installation/configuration/broker-configs.html#confluent.reporters.telemetry.auto.enable for side effects (disables self-balancing).