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• Establishing a connection - Connecting to a remote process via JMX requires configuring and exposing multiple JMX ports to the outside world. This is a burden on users, as most production deployments may stand behind layers of firewalls and have policies against opening ports. This makes opening the ports and connections in the middle of an incident even more burdensome
• Security - JMX and tools around it support authentication and authorization but it is an additional hassle to set up credentials for another system.
• Manual process - Changing the whole cluster's log level requires manually connecting to each broker. In big deployments, this is severely impractical and forces users to build tooling around it.

Proposition

Ideally, Kafka would support dynamically changing log levels and address all of the aforementioned concerns out of the box.

We propose extending the IncrementalAlterConfig/DescribeConfig Admin API with functionality for dynamically altering the a single broker's log level.

This approach would also pave the way for even finer-grained logging logic (e.g log DEBUG level only for a certain topic) and would allow us to leverage the existing AlterConfigPolicy for custom user-defined validation of log-level changes.
These log-level changes will be temporary and reverted on broker restart - we will not persist them anywhere.

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