Most teams handle field-level data protection with client-side interceptors — code that has to live in every producer and consumer, in every language, maintained by every team that touches the topic. Renaming a topic means a migration project. And visibility into event traffic usually means duct-taping together consumer lag exporters, broker JMX, and whatever dashboard someone built two reorgs ago.

These are workarounds, not solutions. They don't scale past a handful of topics, and they put governance in the hands of whichever team remembered to implement it — instead of enforcing it centrally, the way you'd expect from anything calling itself a control plane.

Kong Event Gateway 1.2 moves three of these jobs into the gateway: encryption, topic presentation, and observability.

Two new policies — `field_encryption` and `field_decryption` — let you encrypt and decrypt specific fields inside JSON or Avro records as they pass through the gateway.

The rest of the record stays untouched and readable. Say a payments topic carries an Avro message with a `card_number` field and a dozen other fields consumers need for processing — you encrypt just that one field. Everything else flows through exactly as before.

Both policies depend on the schema validation policy — it's what tells the gateway where the field lives in the record and what type it is, so encryption can target the right field instead of guessing at byte offsets. Pair schema validation with your existing schema registry or data catalog, and there's no manual field-mapping to maintain as schemas evolve. Because the encryption happens at the gateway, producers and consumers don't need any code changes, any new SDKs, or any awareness that the policy even exists.

Kafka topic names are immutable in a way that eventually becomes a problem for every platform team. Kong Event Gateway 1.2 lets you expose a topic under a different name entirely — or several different names, to different consumer groups, at the same time.

A few things this actually unlocks:

• - **Hiding internal naming from external or partner-facing consumers**, without renaming the underlying topic
• - **Migrating consumers off a topic gradually**, by aliasing the old name to the new topic instead of coordinating a hard cutover
• - **Creating filtered, alias-scoped views** of a single topic for different consumer groups, each with its own policy enforcement

Aliases support per-client match expressions, so you can control exactly which consumers see which alias — and each alias enforces its own policies independently. One physical topic, multiple governed presentations, zero changes on the producer or consumer side.

The last piece is visibility. Kong Event Gateway 1.2 adds a real-time analytics dashboard in Konnect, covering both aggregate and virtual-cluster-level metrics: total bytes produced, total bytes consumed, and unique principals, all over a selectable time window. You can toggle volume between bytes and record count, depending on which one actually matches how your team thinks about load.

Beyond the top-line numbers, the dashboard breaks down the top five topics produced to and consumed from, plus the top five producers and consumers by volume — so when traffic spikes, you're not left guessing which topic or which client is driving it. Pair that with command success rates and error codes, and most incidents start with a look at Konnect instead of a scramble across five different tools.

This isn't meant to replace your existing observability stack. It's meant to answer the question you have most often during an incident — "is this a gateway problem or a broker problem, and who's actually causing it?" — without leaving Konnect.

Kong Event Gateway 1.2 pushes Konnect further toward being the control plane for event data governance, not just event routing. Field-level policy enforcement, flexible topic presentation, and built-in visibility are the same category of control you already expect from an API gateway — now applied to Kafka.

The schema validation groundwork in this release is also the foundation for what's next: deeper schema-aware policy enforcement and governance that spans multiple event streams, not just one topic at a time.

Kong Event Gateway 1.2 is available now in Konnect. Try it in Konnect or [read the docs](https://developer.konghq.com/event-gateway/)read the docs and see what field-level control over your event streams actually looks like.