I am looking for a performance/load tool to test a spring boot app consuming and producing Kafka messages using Google Protobufs serializers, so far I've come across jmeter plugin kloadgen but I am not able to get this working.
With Galing I came across gatling-kafka-plugin but it looks like it does not support protobufs.
For KLoadGen Support section says
We’ll be glad to talk and discuss how KLoadGen can help you 😊
Reach us through GitHub issues, GitHub discussions, email or Twitter.
In order to get comprehensive help here you need to provide a minimal reproducible example
So far I can only give you few generic hints:
If JMeter doesn't behave as you expect take a look at jmeter.log file. If worth enabling JMeter debug logging for components/plugins you're using
JMeter is a pure Java load testing tool and it provides JSR223 Sampler which is capable of executing arbitrary Groovy code, Java Request sampler, JUnit Request sampler or there is a possibility to develop your own plugin.
It means that you can simply take example code from here or here, adapt it to your needs and use in any of above test elements.