Confluent is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. Our cloud-native offering is the foundational platform for data in motion --- designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organization.

Authenticating

Confluent uses HTTP Basic Auth, a developer-friendly delegated access protocol. Quolum has already connected the necessary wires with Confluent. Using a sequence of click-throughs, your organization's administrator allows Quolum to make API calls to Confluent without getting access to passwords.

Step 1: Initiate a connection to Confluent

Click the Connect button from the Connections card. If you are not an admin, you can invite your organization's Confluent admin to make a connection to your Confluent organization account. When you click on the Connect button, the web browser will open a pop-up asking API Key and API Secret as shown in Step 2.

Step 2: Log in to Confluent

Log in to Confluent using your organization's credentials. The exact login mechanism may depend on your Confluent plan, and the sign-in mechanism used. You may have corporate SSO such as Azure AD, GSuite, or Okta along with multi-factor authentication. Once you have successfully logged-in you can find the API Key and API Secret as mentioned below in Step 3.

Step 3: Finding the API Key and API Secret in Confluent

Step 3.1: Click the 3-arrowed button on the top right corner of the page as shown below

Step 3.2: Click on "Cloud API Keys" on the Drop down list and it will open a new screen as shown below

Step 3.3: Click on "Create Key" on the Drop down list and it will open a new screen as shown below

Step 3.4: Click on "Global access" card and it will open a new page having the API Key and API Secret

Step 4: Provide consent to Quolum

The next screen after login into Confluent is the consent screen. On this screen, Confluent confirms whether you authorize Quolum to access your organization's data.

Step 5: Back to Quolum

Once you have granted access to Quolum on Confluent website, Confluent is going to send you back to Quolum's page in Step 1, where you started. The Connect button on the Connections card would now say Reconnect. Reconnect is used to reauthenticate under circumstances where the access has expired.

Under the hood

Using the OAuth protocol, Quolum now has delegated access to your Confluent Workspace. The Quolum server, running on Amazon AWS VPC, will be able to make API calls and retrieve feature-level utilization. Later, this data is crunched and available for visualization on the Quolum dashboard.