Using (0.8.2.1) kafka.javaapi.consumer.SimpleConsumer and examining a partition's metadata I'm seeing conflicting information for replicas and ISR compared to the CLI /opt/kafka/bin/kafka-topics.sh --describe for the same topic/partition. The CLI command shows replicas are equal to ISR, whereas the simple consumer usually shows only 2/3 ISR.
Here's a gist [1] that I'm using for my testing. Note, it doesn't actively determine the leader to fetch the metadata from, however when I execute it against a seed broker list that only contains the leader of the partition I'm interested in, the results are the same. This leads me to expect that the metadata is the same regardless of which broker you query (as opposed to consuming offsets which require you request from only the leader). Links: ------ [1] https://gist.github.com/ariens/f9e5f70ac4a5a139eac0