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Lenses
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Lenses
By Lenses.io Ltd
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4.8 out of 5 stars
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Lenses Reviews & Product Details

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Ivan V.
IV
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Lenses?

- Beautiful, responsive UI for kafka overview and with lenses SQL for kafka topics browsing

- Advanced kafka broker metrics which simplify monitoring and alerting

- Seamless data integration capabilities using lenses SQL processors

- Data protection policies and role based UI

- Schema registry integration for avro based payloads Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

- You need to use lenses UI for development of SQL processors: develop, export, import into prod. No developer centric workflow assumed Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Lenses:

Try lenses box first to see if it suites your needs Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

- Troubleshooting production incidents

- Overall visibility of data in kafka for all relevant people (due to role based access control and ability to mask data based on policies)

- Improved monitoring of kafka brokers

- Data integration scenarios can be done in minutes Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Lenses Overview

Editedit
What is Lenses?

Lenses.io delivers a developer workspace for building & operating real-time applications on any Apache Kafka. By enabling teams to monitor, investigate, secure and deploy on their data platform, organizations can shift their focus to data-driven business outcomes and help engineers get their weekends back.

Lenses Details
Discussions
Lenses Community
Languages Supported
English
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Product Description

Lenses, a product to streamline your data pipelines over Kubernetes, connect Kafka with external systems and easily manage your cluster. The data streaming platform that simplifies your streams with Kafka and Kubernetes; any flow, any data, one Lens.

How do you position yourself against your competitors?

Lenses.io workspaces are decoupled from underlying data infrastructure by design. This gives developers and platform engineers a consistent environment to explore, process and move data with SQL, apply fine-grained governance controls and deploy real-time applications on Kafka, Kubernetes, Elastic, and the next Open-Source data technology.

Seller Details
Seller
Lenses.io Ltd
Year Founded
2016
HQ Location
London, England
Twitter
@lensesio
751 Twitter followers
LinkedIn® Page
www.linkedin.com
29 employees on LinkedIn®
Evan R.
ER
Overview Provided by:
Evan Rosenstein

Recent Lenses Reviews

Michael G.
MG
Michael G.Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)
5.0 out of 5
"Invaluable tool for anyone using Kafka"
A great way to sample and query data in a GUI. We didn't have a reliable way to do that before.
Read more
Kyriakos P.
KP
Kyriakos P.Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
5.0 out of 5
"Lenses for understanding Kafka"
Lenses provides a quick inside view of all you data flow. It has helped our junior team coming from an SQL background to understand Kafka and its...
Read more
Alexandru-Florian A.
AA
Alexandru-Florian A.Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
5.0 out of 5
"DataOps for Kafka"
Lenses is amazing at providing insights into the Kafka topics as well as offering a broad range of tools for administering Kafka data policies, ACL...
Read more

Lenses Pricing

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Platform
CONTACT US
Developer
$49
See all 3 Lenses pricing levels
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Lenses Media

Lenses Demo - Topology
View topology of apps and flows, including external Go/Python/.Net/Java applications. Perfect for knowing what's out there, data lineage and troubleshooting
Lenses Demo - Kafka Topics
Browse metadata and payload across Kafka streams and Elastic indices by offset, timestamp or SQL. Protected by data role-based security and data anonymization rules. Accessible via Web, CLI, API and SQL Driver.
Lenses Demo - Schema Registry
Centrally manage and evolve schemas for all data types including AVRO, JSON and XML. Connect to external 3rd party schema registries such as Confluent and Cloudera
Lenses Demo - SQL Processors
Deploy and run SQL-based real time applications over any Kafka Connect or Kubernetes infrastructure including AWS EKS
Lenses Demo - Data Masking
Meet data compliance by obfuscating real time data across Kafka and ElasticSearch infrastructure with Data Policies rules
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9 out of 10 Total Reviews for Lenses

4.8 out of 5
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9 out of 10 Total Reviews for Lenses
4.8 out of 5
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4.8 out of 5
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Lenses Pros and Cons

How are these determined?Information
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Pros
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Overall Review Sentiment for LensesQuestion

Time to Implement
<1 day
>12 months
Return on Investment
<6 months
48+ months
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0 (Difficult)
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Alexandru-Florian A.
AA
Integration Solution Architect
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Lenses?

Lenses is amazing at providing insights into the Kafka topics as well as offering a broad range of tools for administering Kafka data policies, ACLs, SQL Processors, Kafka Connectors. I appreciate how easy it is to explore data using the SQL Studio tool. Also the continuous monitoring and audit capabilities are providing good value and instant feedback about the state of the Kafka cluster. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

It would be nice to have a richer set of capabilities for supporting DataOps, such as the possibility of exporting and importing Data Policies, security configurations and ACLs in order to configure multiple instances of Lenses deployed in different environments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

Lenses is a great tool for opening access to the data stored in Kafka while ensuring a safe level of data access security using the Data Policies and Security Groups. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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MG
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
More Options
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Seller invite
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Lenses?

The support on their product! They are unparalleled and quick to respond to any question (even if the fault is not their own). Their team is always friendly and willing to help. It is a pleasure to work with them. Please never change! The slack community is a HUGE benefit for us users. The Lenses product is amazing and I am positive it has drastically increased our development times using Kafka. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

Lack of KStream functions that work in the KSQL Studio, but not the KStreams option. I would LOVE to build custom functions for KStreams, but I hear that is coming sooner than later! Also wish the product had a few more stream reactor connectors and configs for the connectors. Would also love a "data type" converter inside of the UI to convert between string, Avro, JSon ,etc. formats. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

Setting up kafka pipelines and transformations. Our development time has been improved drastically having the lenses UI. The tool also helps us maintain our kafka data, governance and security models as well. The tool is really becoming the center focus of our data ops team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Kyriakos P.
KP
Software Architect
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Review source: Seller invite
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Lenses?

Lenses provides a quick inside view of all you data flow.

It has helped our junior team coming from an SQL background to understand Kafka and its streaming nature much faster flattening the learning curve.

Personally, I love the support. Especially through slack the response is very quick and hands on. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

There is not much to dislike. Lenses provides us an inside view of our streaming data in a way we could not do before. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Lenses:

Start off with the Docker Box installation to play around and join Slack. Once anyone gets a first feel of the product he/she will be impressed. Easy to use and very insightful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

Lenses helps us create proof of concepts quickly using the SQL Processors and also we use it as a Kafka training tool for our engineers that haven't used Kafka in the past. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Verified User in Transportation/Trucking/Railroad
UT
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Seller invite
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Lenses?

Lenses is an intuitive tool that provides great observability and management features for our streaming environment. It has some very useful interfaces for managing and querying Kafka topics. Lenses has proven to increase productivity in our environment by enabling developers to more quickly ascertain state. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

In the current release (3.2.1), some types of Kafka consumers (e.g. Apache Flink) appear as "inactive" even though they are active. This is not a "showstopper", but it could be confusing to some users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Lenses:

Download the Lenses Box and run it locally to see all the features in action. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

Lenses is helping us more quickly iterate on our streaming-related projects. It provides a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use interface that helps our developers troubleshoot Kafka-related issues. Additionally, it has been invaluable in helping us design our partitioning strategies, as well as capacity plan. Furthermore, it provides us with the means to easily query billions of IoT messages to troubleshoot devices in the field. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Donny F.
DF
Data Engineer/Architect
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: G2 invite on behalf of seller
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Lenses?

The view into the data in our Kafka topics, the ability to "scan through" the records in a topic and query it for troubleshooting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

There's no free/open version (but there is a trial version and local developer version). This makes the adoption curve a bit steep for small-scale deployments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Lenses:

Try the Lenses Box docker image locally. This image can also works as a general and lightweight Kafka development environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're using Lenses to enable our developers to effectively adopt and work with Kafka. The security features and data protection policies paves the way for a wide user base. Finally, the people behind Lenses (Landoop) are great to work with! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Michael G.
MG
Principal Engineer
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
More Options
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Seller invite
Incentivized Review
(Original )Information
What do you like best about Lenses?

A great way to sample and query data in a GUI. We didn't have a reliable way to do that before. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

Producing messages within Lenses seems to require that messages already exist on the topic, and if you use Avro, it will only use one schema for that topic. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

Using Lenses, we realized our lo compaction strategy wasn't working. Lenses was a critical tool in finding the cause and fixing it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Verified User in Financial Services
AF
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Review source: G2 invite on behalf of seller
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Lenses?

The ability to quickly filter the messages inside the Kafka topics by SQL.

P.S: the autocompletion suggestions are invaluable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

The fact that the SQL view to filter the topics messages only works with websockets enabled. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Lenses:

Lenses is a great product made by great people.

The Lenses team is incredibly skilled and always ready to help in case of any kind of issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

I solve a tons of problems with Lenses! Introspection all around! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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George F.
GF
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Review source: G2 invite on behalf of seller
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Lenses?

Topologies, UX and how easy is to use #awesome Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

Lack of features regarding protobuf #proto Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

I'm solving problems regarding traceability Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Verified User in Human Resources
AH
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Review source: G2 invite on behalf of seller
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Lenses?

I like the custom serde ability and lenses sql. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Lenses?

buggy with configs, bugs in LSQL, VERY weird bash script for docker image env vars. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Lenses solving and how is that benefiting you?

finding problematic events

finding partition skew

consumer group lag detection Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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