hi
Are you looking for an official way to add "labels" to topics? If so, there is
no such mechanism for now. One workaround is to create a compacted topic to
store them. Another is to encode the labels within the topic name, such as
a-b-c-d.
If topic-level labels are a crucial feature for you, please feel free to open a
JIRA and KIP for it.
Best,
Chia-Ping
On 2026/04/13 03:07:15 Satyaprakash Dwibedi via users wrote:
> Hello Kafka Community,
>
> We have a use case that requires attaching custom metadata to topics —
> things like SLA, durability guarantees, and PagerDuty account references.
> While exploring this in Kafka 4.2.0, we noticed an interesting
> inconsistency between broker-level and topic-level configuration behavior.
>
> Broker-level custom configs work fine:
>
> Running the following command succeeds without errors:
>
> ./bin/kafka-configs.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 \
> --entity-type brokers --entity-name 1 \
> --alter --add-config 'durability.level=1'
>
> And describing the broker returns the config as expected:
>
> ./bin/kafka-configs.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 \
> --entity-type brokers --entity-name 1 \
> --describe
>
> Output:
>
> Dynamic configs for broker 1 are:
> durability.level=null sensitive=true
> synonyms={DYNAMIC_BROKER_CONFIG:durability.level=null}
>
> Topic-level custom configs throw an exception:
>
> Running a similar command on a topic:
>
> ./bin/kafka-configs.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 \
> --entity-type topics --entity-name test-topic-metadata \
> --alter --add-config 'durability.level=3'
>
> ...results in an InvalidConfigurationException.
>
> Our question:
>
> Is this asymmetry intentional? Is there a design reason why unknown/custom
> configurations are permitted at the broker level but rejected at the topic
> level? And is there a recommended approach for attaching arbitrary custom
> metadata to topics in Kafka?
>
> Any guidance or pointers to relevant KIPs would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Thanks in advance [image: :pray:]
>
