How Cruise Control self-healing works

The Anomaly detector is responsible for the self-healing feature of Cruise Control. When self-healing is enabled in Cruise Control, the detected anomalies can trigger the attempt to automatically fix certain types of failure such as broker failure, disk failure, goal violations and other anomalies.

Broker failures

The anomaly is detected when a non-empty broker crashes or when a broker is removed from a cluster. This results in offline replicas and under-replicated partitions.

When the broker failure is detected, Cruise Control receives an internal notification. If self-healing for this anomaly type is enabled, Cruise Control will trigger an operation to move all the offline replicas to other healthy brokers in the cluster. Because brokers can be removed in general during cluster management, the anomaly detector provides a configurable period of time before the notifier is triggered and the self-healing process starts.

If a broker disappears from a cluster at a timestamp specified as T, the detector will start a countdown. If the broker did not rejoin the cluster within the broker.failure.alert.threshold.ms since the specified T, the broker is defined as dead and an alert is triggered. Within the defined time of broker.failure.self.healing.threshold.ms, the self-healing process is activated and the failed broker is decommissioned.

Goal violations

The anomaly is detected when an optimization goal is violated.

When an optimization goal is violated, Cruise Control receives an internal notification. If self-healing for this anomaly type is enabled, Cruise Control will proactively attempt to address the goal violation by automatically analyzing the workload, and executing optimization proposals.

You need to configure the anomaly.detection.goals property if you enable self-healing for goal violations to choose which type of goal violations should be considered. By default, the following goals are set for anomaly.detection.goals:

• com.linkedin.kafka.cruisecontrol.analyzer.goals.RackAwareGoal
• com.linkedin.kafka.cruisecontrol.analyzer.goals.ReplicaCapacityGoal
• com.linkedin.kafka.cruisecontrol.analyzer.goals.DiskCapacityGoal

Disk failure

The anomaly is detected when one of the non-empty disks dies.

When a disk fails, Cruise Control will send out a notification. If self-healing for this anomaly type is enabled, Cruise Control will trigger an operation to move all the offline replicas by replicating alive replicas to other healthy brokers in the cluster.

Slow broker

The anomaly is detected when based on the configured thresholds, a broker is identified as a slow broker.

Within the Metric anomaly, you can set the threshold to identify slow brokers. In case a broker is identified as slow, the broker will be decommissioned or demoted based on the configuration you set for the remove.slow.broker. The remove.slow.broker configuration can be set to true, this means the slow broker will be removed. When setting the remove.slow.broker configuration to false, the slow broker will be demoted.

For more information about configuring the slow broker finder, see the official Cruise Control documentation.

Topic replication factor

The anomaly is detected when a topic partition does not have the desired replication factor.

The topic partition will be reconfigured to match the desired replication factor.