Kafka consumer list

Question

I need to find out a way to ask Kafka for a list of topics. I know I can do that using the kafka-topics.sh script included in the bin\\ directory.

Answer 1

I do not see it mentioned here, but a command that i use often and that helps me to have a bird's eye view on all groups, topics, partitions, offsets, lags, consumers, etc

kafka-consumer-groups.bat --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --describe --all-groups

A sample would look like this:

GROUP TOPIC PARTITION  CURRENT-OFFSET  LOG-END-OFFSET  LAG CONSUMER-ID HOST CLIENT-ID
Group Topic 2          7               7               0      XXXX 
:
:

The most important column is the LAG, where for a healthy platform, ideally it should be 0(or nearer to 0 or a low number for high throughput) - at all times. So make sure you monitor it!!! ;-).

P.S:
An interesting article on how you can monitor the lag can be found here.