title: Understanding Kafka Producer Metrics
body: <p>While investigating a slow producer in one of our environments, we came across the following metrics in a Kafka producer:</p>
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/BBAoG.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Producer Metrics </a></p>
  <p>As you can see, somehow, the producer.request_rate is higher than producer.topic.record_send_rate. In theory, assuming this producer is writing to a single topic, we shouldn't have more requests than the actual records. In fact, when everything is working properly, we see less requests than records as they are batched for performance. This is using the default (16kb) batch with 100ms linger. Obviously, we can increase the batch, but I'd like to understand what happened here first.</p>
  <p>Am I interpreting these metrics correctly?</p>