Kafka Topic Not Showing as Active After Deployment – Best Practices Needed?

[MarcoB]

Hi everyone,

I’ve run into a puzzling issue with Kafka topics in ServiceNow and could use some insights from the community. Here’s what’s happening:

I created a new Kafka topic in our dev environment and bundled it into an update set for deployment to the test environment. After deployment, the topic shows up fine in the sys_kafka_topic table, so it seems to be registering correctly. I also generated a PKI certificate with read access for the topic. But when I check the list of active topics in the target environment (via Hermes Messaging Service > Diagnostics > Get List), the topic doesn’t appear. There’s no entry in hermes_topics_state either, which makes me think it’s not being recognized as active.

I tried a couple of troubleshooting steps—syncing the partition and rescanning the topic—but no luck. The only thing that works is recreating the topic manually in the target environment. When I do that, the "Create Hermes topic" business rule kicks in, and everything works perfectly.

While this workaround gets the job done, it’s not exactly efficient, and I’d rather figure out how to deploy topics properly through update sets without needing this extra step. Has anyone else run into this? Is there a trick to making Kafka topics activate correctly during deployment? Or maybe a step I’m missing in the process?

Would love to hear your thoughts or any best practices you follow for deploying Kafka topics in ServiceNow.

Thanks in advance for any advice!