Kafka committed and last offsets using admin API

Question

I am querying kafka broker using the admin client API to get the committed offsets of CONSUMER_GROUP using the below code:

Map<TopicPartition, OffsetAndMetadata> offsets =
                admin.listConsumerGroupOffsets(CONSUMER_GROUP)
                        .partitionsToOffsetAndMetadata().get();

The above code will trigger a query to a special created __consumer_offsets topic to get the committed offsets for each of the partition of the topic(s)-partition that CONSUMER_GROUP is responsible for.

On the other hand, I am using the below code to retrieve the latest (end) offsets for each of the topic(s) partition of CONSUMER_GROUP

for(TopicPartition tp: offsets.keySet()) {
requestLatestOffsets.put(tp, OffsetSpec.latest());
}

Map<TopicPartition, ListOffsetsResult.ListOffsetsResultInfo> latestOffsets =
admin.listOffsets(requestLatestOffsets).all().get();

for (Map.Entry<TopicPartition, OffsetAndMetadata> e: offsets.entrySet()) {
long latestOffset = latestOffsets.get(e.getKey()).offset();

My question is that the committed and latest offsets are hence queried/requested from two different topics. The committed offset are requested from the __consumer_offsets topic, and the latest (end) offsets are requested from the actual topic(s) of the CONSUMER_GROUP.

(1) is the above description about requesting committed and latest offsets accurate?

(2) is it possible to query __consumer_offsets topic directly?

Thank you.

2) What do you mean "query"? [You can consume that topic](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33925866/kafka-how-to-read-from-consumer-offsets-topic) — OneCricketeer, Sep 21 '21 at 15:43

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 21 '21 at 16:36

Yes your understanding is correct. Committed offsets are stored in the __consumer_offsets topic while you need to query specific partitions to get their end offsets.
Yes __consumer_offsets is a regular topic, you can consume it directly if you want. It's typically way easier to retrieve data via the provided API, but if you're interested in its content you can consume it. Check the console Formatters if you want to see how to deserialize the data.

Kafka committed and last offsets using admin API

1 Answers1