This provides a quick introduction to setting up a local Kafka instance and using Kafka Tool to view the messages. The initial part of the Kafka tutorial is adapted slightly from  http://kafka.apache.org/quickstart.html .   The following are steps for:   Downloading and unpacking Apache Kafka in Linux  Starting the Zookeeper and Kafka servers  Creating a new topic  Adding and viewing messages using the command line tools  Use Kafka Tool to view the messages in a topic    Step 1: Download Kafka  cd ./Downloads/  wget http://mirror.catn.com/pub/apache/kafka/0.10.0.0/kafka_2.11-0.10.0.0.tgz  tar -zxf kafka_2.11-0.10.0.0.tgz  cd kafka_2.11-0.10.0.0      Step 2: Start the Zookeeper and Kafka servers   Check the Kafka port in zookeeper.properties  by looking at clientPort (typically 2181) in   config/zookeeper.properties     Start Zookeeper with:  bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties   and then start Kafka:  bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties    ...