As a long time Kafka, Zookeeper, and Prometheus user, I have been utilizing the JMX exporter to gather operational metrics from my Zookeeper and Kafka clusters. Having to bolt on an additional component is never fun, so I was delighted to see that Zookeeper 3.6.0 added native Prometheus metric support. Enabling it is as easy as adding the following lines to your zoo.cfg configuration file:
metricsProvider.className=org.apache.zookeeper.metrics.prometheus.PrometheusMetricsProvider
metricsProvider.httpPort=7000
metricsProvider.exportJvmInfo=true
The included metrics rock, and there are now dozens of additional USEFUL metrics you can add to your dashboards. Hopefully Kafka will take note and provide native Prometheus metrics in a future release.