Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Describe a topic using the Amazon CLI

Run the following command, replacing ClusterArn with the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of your cluster and TopicName with the name of the topic you want to describe.

aws kafka describe-topic --cluster-arn ClusterArn --topic-name TopicName

The output of this command looks like the following JSON example.

{
    "topicArn": "arn:aws:kafka:us-east-1:123456789012:topic/MyCluster/abcd1234-abcd-dcba-4321-a1b2abcd9f9f-2/MyTopic",
    "topicName": "MyTopic",
    "partitionCount": 3,
    "replicationFactor": 3,
    "configs": "Y29tcHJlc3Npb24udHlwZT1wcm9kdWNlcgpyZXRlbnRpb24ubXM9NjA0ODAwMDAw",
    "status": "ACTIVE"
}

Understanding topic status

The status field indicates the current state of the topic. The following table describes the possible status values.

Understanding topic configurations

The configs field contains the topic's Kafka configuration properties, encoded in Base64 format. To view the configuration in a readable format, you need to decode the Base64 string.

The following example shows how to decode the configuration using the base64 command on Linux or macOS.

echo "Y29tcHJlc3Npb24udHlwZT1wcm9kdWNlcgpyZXRlbnRpb24ubXM9NjA0ODAwMDAw" | base64 --decode

The decoded output shows the topic configuration properties in key-value format.

compression.type=producer
retention.ms=604800000

For more information about topic-level configuration properties, see Topic-level Amazon MSK configuration.