Browse messages in Kafka topics with Message Viewer

Confluent for VS Code includes the Message Viewer. Use it to browse, search, and filter the messages in an Apache Kafka® topic directly from your editor, without switching to a separate tool.

Click the play icon next to a topic name to open the Message Viewer. It lets you search and explore messages in that topic. In Message Viewer, you can:

  • Page through and search for specific values within the list of all messages.

  • Double-click a message to see its headers, key, and value decoded to JSON. The detail view also shows metadata about the key or value schema used for deserialization.

  • Pause and resume consuming at any time.

  • See aggregate counts of messages over time in the histogram view, and drag across the histogram to filter messages by timestamp.

  • Toggle partitions on and off to show and hide messages from specific partitions.