Production Support
Troubleshooting Guide
Common Kafka issues, symptoms, root causes, and resolution steps
3
Critical
3
Warning
6
Total Issues
24/7
Support Ready
Symptoms
- Messages piling up in topics
- Consumers unable to keep up with producers
- Increasing lag in kafka-consumer-groups output
Root Causes
- Consumer processing too slow
- Not enough consumers in the group
- Network bottlenecks
- Garbage collection pauses in Java consumers
Resolution Steps
- Scale out consumers (add more instances)
- Optimize consumer processing logic
- Increase partition count for parallelism
- Tune JVM settings for better performance
Diagnostic Commands
Check consumer lag
kafka-consumer-groups.sh --describe --group <group-name> --bootstrap-server localhost:9092
Monitor lag over time
kafka-consumer-groups.sh --describe --all-groups --bootstrap-server localhost:9092
Sample Log Messages
[Consumer clientId=consumer-1] Skipping fetch for partition orders-0 because it has no usable fetch position
[Consumer clientId=consumer-1] Setting offset for partition orders-0 to the committed offset 12345