Kafka TLS Certificate Rotation Triggered False Critical Alert on Production Cluster

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A production Kafka cluster running on Amazon EKS triggered a critical alert for under-replicated partitions one Saturday afternoon, alarming on-call engineers. By the time the team investigated, the issue had resolved itself — the Strimzi operator had automatically rotated TLS certificates and performed a controlled, one-at-a-time broker restart, exactly as designed. The monitoring system had flagged the midpoint of this routine maintenance window as an emergency. A key factor in limiting the incident's impact was a 200-line Kubernetes operator called Reflector, which mirrored the primary cluster's CA certificate secret across namespaces so MirrorMaker2 could maintain its replication to the contingency cluster without interruption. The incident highlighted how automated certificate lifecycle management in self-managed Kafka on Kubernetes can interact unexpectedly with alerting systems that lack context about planned operational events.

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