How to remove a Kafka consumer group from a specific topic?

Question

I changed the consumer-group-id of my web service listening to a Kafka topic. Now, the old group id is still registered to the topic, but there is no consumer with that group id. Therefore, it is lagging. How can I remove a specific consumer group from a specific topic?

I tried this:

kafka-consumer-groups --bootstrap-server kafka01.myserver.com:9092 --topic notification-topic --delete --group old-consumer-group --execute

But it returns: "The consumer does not support topic-specific offset deletion from a consumer group."

Should I remove the consumer group totally? I use the same group id listening to other topics, are they going to be affected?

Answer 1

Starting with Kafka 2.4.0 it is possible to delete individual consumer group id offsets from a topic.

The call is very close to what you have already tried, but requires --delete-offsets instead of --delete:

./kafka-consumer-groups.sh \
  --bootstrap-server <bootstrap-server-url> \
  --delete-offsets \
  --group <my-group> \
  --topic <topic-name>

To date this is not reflected in the official documentation (Kafka 2.7.0 and below). However, it is described in a confluence document of improvement proposal KIP-496 that has been implemented and released.