Monitor Consumer Lag¶

You can monitor consumer lag with Confluent Cloud using the methods described in this document.

Monitor Consumer Lag via the Metrics API¶

We recommend using the Metrics API to monitor how Consumer Lag changes over time. To monitor at the Topic and Consumer Group level of detail, you can use a supported integration. To view data at the more detailed Consumer and Partition level, you can begin from the example query.

Note that this metric differs from the output of the kafka-consumer-groups command output in two ways.

Rebalancing Consumer Groups returns the last value for lag from before rebalancing until it completes.
Consumer Groups with no active Consumers are not returned in the result.

For example, a Consumer Group has two Consumers that are active but lagging behind by 3 and 4 records each. The Metrics API returns values of 3 and 4 for those Consumers respectively. A rebalance begins and more records are sent to the topic but they cannot be consumed until the rebalance completes. The rebalance takes two minutes. For those two minutes, the value for lag is 3 and 4 despite 20 records being sent to the topic during those two minutes. Upon completion of the rebalance, the Metrics API will return values of 13 and 14 for those Consumers respectively. Now both Consumers are turned off completely such that they no longer send their heartbeats. From this point, the Metrics API will no longer return data for this Consumer Group at all.

Monitor Consumer Lag via the Confluent Cloud Interface¶

Select your cluster name.
Choose Clients and select the Consumer Lag tab. A list of consumer groups displays.
Select a consumer group from the list to see lag details for that group.

For more information on creating a consumer, see Quick Start for Confluent Cloud.

Monitor Offset Lag via Java Client Metrics¶

You can monitor the records-lag-max metric from the Java consumer.

Monitor Consumer Latency via Client Interceptors¶

You can use Confluent Control Center to track consumer latency and more.

Monitor Offset Lag via Kafka Admin API¶

You can monitor offsets by using the Kafka Admin API and the associated CLI, which enables accessing lag information programmatically. For more information, see AdminClient Configurations.

Prerequisites

Access to Confluent Cloud.
Java version 1.7.0_111 or greater, 1.8.0_102 or greater, and 1.9
A web browser
Confluent Platform is installed

Create a client properties file to hold the Confluent Cloud configuration. In this example, it is named client_ssl.properties. This file should contain the Confluent Cloud client configurations. You can find this information in the CLI and client configuration tab of Confluent Cloud Console. Configure this example for your environment:
```
ssl.endpoint.identification.algorithm=https
sasl.mechanism=PLAIN
sasl.jaas.config=org.apache.kafka.common.security.plain.PlainLoginModule required \
username="<cloud-api-key>" \
password="<cloud-api-key-secret>";
security.protocol=SASL_SSL
```
Set the BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS variable to the Confluent Cloud cluster bootstrap URL. You can find this value by clicking Cluster settings from the Cloud Console interface.
```
BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS="<bootstrap-url>"
```
From the Confluent Platform installation home, list the consumer groups. Confluent Cloud properties are passed in with the --command-config argument. A bootstrap server must be provided to the script.
```
./bin/kafka-consumer-groups --bootstrap-server ${BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS} --command-config \
client-ssl.properties --list  _confluent-healthcheck  example-group
```

For each consumer group, check its offsets using this command. This command only shows information about consumers that use the Java consumer API (i.e., non-ZooKeeper-based consumers).

./bin/kafka-consumer-groups --bootstrap-server ${BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS} \
 --command-config /tmp/client.properties --describe --group _confluent-healthcheck

Your output should resemble:

TOPIC                          PARTITION  CURRENT-OFFSET  LOG-END-OFFSET  LAG        CONSUMER-ID                                       HOST                           CLIENT-ID
_confluent-healthcheck         0          13164704        13164773        69         healthcheck-agent-bf8d1655-63a6-4061-b680-0f11cdf182e5/100.96.67.0                   healthcheck-agent
_confluent-healthcheck         1          13161581        13161650        69         healthcheck-agent-bf8d1655-63a6-4061-b680-0f11cdf182e5/100.96.67.0                   healthcheck-agent
_confluent-healthcheck         2          12229509        12229578        69         healthcheck-agent-bf8d1655-63a6-4061-b680-0f11cdf182e5/100.96.67.0                   healthcheck-agent
_confluent-healthcheck         3          86              86              0          healthcheck-agent-bf8d1655-63a6-4061-b680-0f11cdf182e5/100.96.67.0                   healthcheck-agent
...

The fourth column shows the lag, the difference between the last committed offset and the latest offset in the log.

Known kafka-consumer-groups Issues¶

If you encounter the following error:

Error: Executing consumer group command failed due to Failed to construct kafka consumer

or if the command fails with a TimeoutException, then the configuration of request.timeout.ms in client_ssl.properties (which defaults to 5000 in the kafka-consumer-groups command line tool) needs to be raised. For example:

request.timeout.ms=60000

Suggested Resources¶

To learn how to architect, monitor, and optimize your Kafka applications on Confluent Cloud, refer to Developing Client Applications on Confluent Cloud.