Paul's answer is very good and it is actually how Kafka & Zk work together from a broker point of view.
I would say that another easy option to check if a Kafka server is running is to create a simple KafkaConsumer pointing to the cluste and try some action, for example, listTopics(). If kafka server is not running, you will get a TimeoutException and then you can use a try-catch
sentence.
def validateKafkaConnection(kafkaParams : mutable.Map[String, Object]) : Unit = {
val props = new Properties()
props.put("bootstrap.servers", kafkaParams.get("bootstrap.servers").get.toString)
props.put("group.id", kafkaParams.get("group.id").get.toString)
props.put("key.deserializer", "org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringDeserializer")
props.put("value.deserializer", "org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringDeserializer")
val simpleConsumer = new KafkaConsumer[String, String](props)
simpleConsumer.listTopics()
}