Configuring the event emitter for an external Apache Kafka instance

To gain insights into the decision-making process of your applications, you can configure the decision runtime to emit events that contain technical and business data to an external Apache Kafka instance.

About this task

Configure the custom resource (CR) YAML file to emit events to an external Kafka instance.

For more information about emitted data, see Emitting decision execution events.

Procedure

The sample configuration that targets a Kafka instance that is deployed in the same Kubernetes cluster as Decision Intelligence Client Managed Software:
```
decision_runtime:
    event_emitter:
      enabled: true
      kafka_topic: adsruntime
      kafka_bootstrap_servers: kafkatest-kafka-bootstrap.strimzi.svc:9093
      kafka_connection_secret_name: kafka-auth  # properties kafka-username and kafka-password
      kafka_security_protocol: SASL_SSL
      kafka_sasl_mechanism: SCRAM-SHA-512
```
When you use a Simple Authentication Security Layer (SASL) authentication mechanism that requires credentials (SCRAM-SHA-512 or PLAIN), the Kubernetes secret that is referenced by the kafka_connection_secret_name property must contain two keys: kafka-username and kafka-password.
When you target a Kafka instance over Transport Layer Security (TLS) (kafka_security_protocol: SASL_SSL), the TLS certificate that establishes trust to this instance can be included in one of the following certificates:
- Cloud Pak TLS trust certificate list (spec.shared_configuration.trusted_certificates)
- Decision runtime trust certificates for Decision Intelligence (spec.ads_configuration.decision_runtime.decision_runtime_service.tls.certs_config_map_name)
- Secret that is referenced by the kafka_connection_secret_name as the kafka-server-certificate property
For more information about the event_emitter.* parameters, see Decision runtime parameters.
Configure the server certificate. The certificate is provided in PEM format in a Kubernetes ConfigMap, which is similar to other certificates such as the ones for the decision service archive repository and machine learning providers.

For more information, see Configuring the decision runtime.