Manage Consumers Groups Using Confluent Control Center

Use Consumers to monitor consumer groups for all the topics in a cluster. Consumer lag enables you to monitor lag for consumers.

Considerations:
  • Consumer Lag for an individual topic can be accessed from the Topics menu.

  • Consumers is enabled by default using an access control setting in the Control Center properties files. For more information, see: Enabling and disabling the Consumers feature

  • RBAC takes precedence over access control settings.

  • If RBAC is enabled for Control Center, the resources you can access are determined by your assigned role or roles and their corresponding privileges.

Manage consumers groups

Use Consumer to manage and monitor consumers and consumer groups.

  • View all consumer groups for a cluster

  • Search for a consumer group by ID

  • View the number of consumers and number of source topics for each consumer group

  • Set up a pre-populated alert for Consumer Lag

To access Consumer:

  • Select a cluster from the navigation bar and select Client, then select Consumers.

Monitor consumer Lag

Use Consumer lag to monitor lag for consumers.

Considerations:
  • The consumer group list displays information about your consumer groups, including the group ID, status, and protocol. You can also find values for group lag, and number of consumers, topics, and partitions.

  • Control Center limits the number of consumer groups shown in Consumer lag if there are many.

  • You can export consumer lag data as a CSV file. For clusters with large amounts of data, you may see a placeholder value like -999 in the currentOffset field. This occurs because Control Center cannot display all the data immediately, and the offsets are not yet available. For large payloads, consider exporting consumer lag data using the Confluent CLI or Confluent Cloud APIs.

To monitor consumer lag

  1. Select your cluster name.

  2. Choose Clients and select Consumer Lag. A list of consumer groups displays.

  3. Select a consumer group from the list to see lag details for that group.

Set up alerts for consumer groups

You can set alerts from the Consumer lag page. These options pre-populate most of the consumer group trigger fields.

  • On the Consumer lag page, click Set up an alert.

For more details, see Consumer lag trigger.

Enabling and disabling the Consumers feature

Consumers is enabled by default.

You can disable by setting the confluent.controlcenter.consumers.view.enable option in the Control Center properties file to false. After disabling the feature, Consumer is no longer visible in Control Center.

To enable Consumers again, set the option back to true and restart Control Center with the updated properties file.

To disable Consumers:

  1. In the control-center.properties file, set confluent.controlcenter.consumers.view.enable to false.

    ...
    confluent.controlcenter.consumers.view.enable=false
    ...
    

    Make the change in the appropriate Control Center properties files configured for your environments, including any of the following files:

    • control-center-dev.properties

    • control-center-production.properties

    Find the properties files here: confluent-control-center/ For more information, see Control Center Configuration Examples for Confluent Platform.

  2. Restart Control Center and pass in the properties file for the configuration to take effect.

    • Local (dev) environment:

      confluent local services control-center stop
      confluent local services control-center start --config confluent-control-center/control-center.properties
      

      Important

      Do not use confluent local for production use.

    • Production environment:

      ./bin/control-center-stop
      ./bin/control-center-start confluent-control-center/control-center.properties