Motivation

This Pulsar Improvement Proposal (PIP) addresses an observability gap in Apache Pulsar by proposing the addition of two new fields to the topic statistics API: topicCreationTimeStamp and lastPublishTimeStamp. Currently, operators and developers lack a direct and efficient method to determine a topic's age or its most recent message activity, hindering effective lifecycle management, troubleshooting, and compliance auditing. This proposal outlines a plan to introduce these timestamps into the TopicStats object, accessible via the Admin REST API and pulsar-admin CLI. The topicCreationTimeStamp will be retrieved directly from the topic's underlying metadata node statistics, providing an immutable value for all topics. The lastPublishTimeStamp will be maintained as a high-performance, in-memory atomic value on the owning broker, with a robust recovery mechanism from the managed ledger to ensure accuracy across broker restarts and topic reloads. These additions will be implemented in a backward-compatible manner, providing essential lifecycle visibility without impacting system performance.

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• Dependencies (add or upgrade a dependency)
• The public API
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• The threading model
• The binary protocol
• The REST endpoints
• The admin CLI options
• The metrics
• Anything that affects deployment

Documentation

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