Based on @afernandez@hortonworks.com suggestion, reference docs for Alerts and Alerts History are available at https://github.com/apache/ambari/blob/branch-2.1/ambari-server/docs/api/v1/alerts.md E.g., to get critical Kafka service alerts (I am using a brilliant cli JSON processor, jq https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ 😞 curl -s -u admin:admin -H 'X-Requested-BY: ambari' \ http://localhost:8080/api/v1/clusters/Sandbox/services/KAFKA/alert_history?fields=* \ | jq '.items[] | select (.AlertHistory.state=="CRITICAL")' This gives me an output like this (pretty-printed): { "href": "http://localhost:8080/api/v1/clusters/Sandbox/services/KAFKA/alert_history/16", "AlertHistory": { "cluster_name": "Sandbox", "component_name": "KAFKA_BROKER", "definition_id": 1, "definition_name": "kafka_broker_process", "host_name": "sandbox.hortonworks.com", "id": 16, "instance": null, "label": "Kafka Broker Process", "service_name": "KAFKA", "state": "CRITICAL", "text": "Connection failed: [Errno 111] Connection refused to sandbox.hortonworks.com:6667", "timestamp": 1439987016669 } } { "href": "http://localhost:8080/api/v1/clusters/Sandbox/services/KAFKA/alert_history/184", "AlertHistory": { "cluster_name": "Sandbox", "component_name": "KAFKA_BROKER", "definition_id": 1, "definition_name": "kafka_broker_process", "host_name": "sandbox.hortonworks.com", "id": 184, "instance": null, "label": "Kafka Broker Process", "service_name": "KAFKA", "state": "CRITICAL", "text": "Connection failed: [Errno 111] Connection refused to sandbox.hortonworks.com:6667", "timestamp": 1439989776335 } } { "href": "http://localhost:8080/api/v1/clusters/Sandbox/services/KAFKA/alert_history/452", "AlertHistory": { "cluster_name": "Sandbox", "component_name": "KAFKA_BROKER", "definition_id": 1, "definition_name": "kafka_broker_process", "host_name": "sandbox.hortonworks.com", "id": 452, "instance": null, "label": "Kafka Broker Process", "service_name": "KAFKA", "state": "CRITICAL", "text": "Connection failed: [Errno 111] Connection refused to sandbox.hortonworks.com:6667", "timestamp": 1443742219799 } } ... View more

In HDP 2.3 you can delete the topic via a standard admin command: bin/kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper 127.0.0.1:2181 --delete --topic someTopic For this to work, one has to make sure the delete.topic.enable flag is set to true (check it via Ambari). Once deleted, any new message posted to the topic will re-create it, assuming the auto.create.topics.enable property is set to true (it might be disabled in production, same as delete one above). If that's the case, then the admin must create the topic again: bin/kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper 127.0.0.1:2181 --create --topic someTopic --partitions 10 --replication-factor 3 ... View more

No, there's a lot more going on under the hood and Ambari Agent is required for operations. Essentially, bring a node into a cluster (agent is installed) and provision only the services desired (e.g. only Knox). ... View more