<a id="controlcenter-userguide-consumers"></a>

# 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](../topics/view.md#c3-view-topic-consumer-lag) 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](#c3-enable-disable-consumers)
  - [RBAC](../security/c3-rbac.md#controlcenter-security-rbac) takes precedence over access control settings.
  - If [RBAC](../security/c3-rbac.md#controlcenter-security-rbac) is enabled for Control Center, the resources you can access are determined by your assigned role or roles and their corresponding privileges.

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## 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](../alerts/examples.md#consumer-lag-trigger)

**To access Consumer**:

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

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## 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.

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## 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](../alerts/examples.md#consumer-lag-trigger).

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## 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`.
   ```bash
   ...
   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](../installation/properties.md#c3-properties-files).
2. Restart Control Center and pass in the properties file for the configuration to take effect.
   - Local (dev) environment:
     ```bash
     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](https://docs.confluent.io/confluent-cli/current/command-reference/local/index.html) for production use.
   - Production environment:
     ```bash
     ./bin/control-center-stop
     ./bin/control-center-start confluent-control-center/control-center.properties
     ```