Hi Andrew, Thanks for this KIP, I’ve personally faced more than one scenario where I’ve had to use the admin client to update the offsets.
The main uses cases teams face ( and TIL about the various options the script offers): Teams migrating to a new consumer group from an existing one but don’t want to commit to either (or duration for newer clients) auto offset reset policy on the new group. Teams want to seek past certain offsets in partitions because they have poison pill messages/corrupted deserialization story and they have no control over the data. In this case, they actually want latest offset strategy but most don’t even realise that it applies to streams out of range and are surprised/frustrated that the property doesn’t move their position in the queues. (I see we can do this already in the script today) When I migrated our clients from 2.x directly to 4.x, out of abundance of caution, I wrote an hourly cron job that dumps the snapshot of group_id,topic,partition,offset into csv files so that if I had to revert a few affected partitions I can trim the csv down to those partitions and alter them with the admin client. AK1. A single command line with args —source-group-id —target-group-id —export so that the intermediate CSV file can be skipped. AK2. Minor: The KIP does not mention the alter/list consumer group offsets Admin call. alter only works as long as there are active members in the group subscription. I was bitten by this in the past; the documentation was sparse around that expectation but it does make sense. AK3. KIP references AdminClient but I believe this is deprecated in favour of just Admin which is the interface that has the methods? AK4. How do we leverage the describe groups RPC when using the script/admin client? I’m trying to imagine flows other than the export group offsets. AK4.1 Can we list active members/offset state in a given group in addition to the GroupState? This has helped identify zombie processes to hunt down. The broker’s view would be useful here. (related to AK2) AK4.2 Could we return empty set of acl operations instead of null? Best, Aditya On 2026/06/17 06:34:11 Andrew Schofield wrote: > Hi, > I’d like to start discussion on a small KIP to improve the usability of the > command-line tools for resetting group offsets. When implementing KIP-1323 > and reviewing the PRs, it became clear that the usability of this area of > Kafka isn’t great. This KIP improves the usability of these tools. > > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1359%3A+Improve+usability+of+resetting+group+offsets > > Thanks, > Andrew >
