Epic Goal

Upgrade to AMQ streams 2.6.0 to adopt some new features(highlighted in Bold and Italic):

AMQ streams 2.6.0 brings additional support for administrators around broker scale-down capabilities, augmented control of connectors, updated metrics and increased operator robustness around ZooKeeper and KRaft cluster identification.

Highlights of this release:

• Based on Kafka 3.6.0 and Strimzi 0.38.x.

• StableConnectIdentities feature gate is now enabled by default. This feature minimizes the number of rebalances of connector tasks.

• This version prevents scale-down of a cluster where brokers are still in use. However, you can bypass this blocking mechanism, if needed.

• Ability to stop a Kafka Connect or Kafka MirrorMaker 2 connector from running. In this state, only the configuration of the connector is kept but nothing is actually running.

• Enhanced cluster identification and handling capabilities by the Cluster Operator when running Kafka clusters in KRaft mode or with ZooKeeper.

• Pause reconciliation of KafkaTopic resources in unidirectional mode. 

• Metrics are available for Unidirectional Topic Operator. 

Why is this important?

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Scenarios

1. As a cluster admin, I can be able to monitor the Kafka status in a dashboard in global hub grafana so that we can enhance the support for AMQ streams.
2. As a cluster admin, I can see a Kafka Connect or Kafka MirrorMaker 2 connector stopped in global hub environment.

Acceptance Criteria

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Dependencies (internal and external)

1. ...

Previous Work (Optional):

1. ...

Open questions:

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Done Checklist

• CI - CI is running, tests are automated and merged.
• Release Enablement <link to Feature Enablement Presentation>
• DEV - Upstream code and tests merged: <link to meaningful PR or GitHub
  Issue>
• DEV - Upstream documentation merged: <link to meaningful PR or GitHub
  Issue>
• DEV - Downstream build attached to advisory: <link to errata>
• QE - Test plans in Polarion: <link or reference to Polarion>
• QE - Automated tests merged: <link or reference to automated tests>
• DOC - Doc issue opened with a completed template. Separate doc issue
  opened for any deprecation, removal, or any current known
  issue/troubleshooting removal from the doc, if applicable.