Kafka

Kafka is a distributed message broker that allows the application to publish and subscribe to topics. It plays a pivotal role in Warehouse Blueprint applications by distributing the data to various microservices for advanced analytics. These microservices, in turn, generate new messages and feed them back to Kafka for downstream use. In scenarios where users require custom real-time analytics, they have the option to either consume data from Kafka or produce data to Kafka through their microservices.

Additional information regarding Kafka can be found in the Quickstart Guide.

Kafka topics used by various microservices are as follows:

Kafka topics

Name	Data Format	Class Name	Description
mdx-raw	Protobuf	nv.Frame	The topic where the Perception microservice sends frame metadata.
mdx-bev	Protobuf	nv.Frame	The topic where the Perception microservice sends Bird’s Eye View (BEV) based frame data.
mdx-behavior	Protobuf	nv.Behavior	The topic used by the analytics pipeline to send behavior data. Refer to Behavior Processing for details.
mdx-behavior-plus	Protobuf	nv.Behavior	Used by the analytics pipeline to send enhanced behavior data, like assigning cluster details to behaviors.
mdx-alerts	Protobuf	nv.Behavior	For all anomaly data sent by the analytics pipeline.
mdx-events	Protobuf	nv.Behavior	Used for sending various events such as IN/OUT tripwire events and ENTRY/EXIT ROI events.
mdx-frames	Protobuf	nv.Frame	This topic is for enriched frames metadata, which may include additional metrics and analytics, such as FOV & ROI occupancy.
mdx-mtmc	JSON	N/A	Used by the Multi-Camera Tracking (MTMC Analytics) microservice for sending MTMC-related data.
mdx-rtls	Protobuf	nv.Frame	Used by the Real Time Location System (RTLS) microservice for sending RTLS-related data.
mdx-amr	JSON	N/A	Used to send Autonomous Mobile Robot’s (AMR) location and events data.
mdx-space-utilization	Protobuf	nv.SpaceUtilization	Used for sending space utilization analytics data.
mdx-notification	JSON	N/A	For sending various notifications such as calibration updates, configuration changes, and sensor management.
mdx-vlm-alerts	Protobuf	nv.Behavior	Used for sending Vision Language Model (VLM) verified alerts.
mdx-incidents	Protobuf	nv.Incident	Used for sending incident data from the analytics pipeline.
mdx-vlm-incidents	Protobuf	nv.Incident	Used for sending Vision Language Model (VLM) verified incident data.
mdx-embed	Protobuf	nv.VisionLLM	Used for sending embedding data for vector similarity searches.

Note

• You can use this Kafka Python library to produce and consume messages. You can find more details regarding the library and sample code over here.