Creating a Kafka Consumer Group

A consumer subscribes to a topic. A consumer group consists of one or more consumers. Within a consumer group, each consumer can consume multiple partitions at the same time. Each partition can be consumed by one consumer at a time.

Figure 1 Example consumption

auto.create.groups.enable: a consumer group is automatically created when a consumer attempts to enter a group that does not exist.

A consumer group is required before consuming messages when auto.create.groups.enable is false in Configuring Parameters. Otherwise, consumption will fail.
A consumer group is created automatically before consuming messages when auto.create.groups.enable is true in Configuring Parameters.

This section describes how to create a consumer group on the console. This operation does not restart the Kafka instance.

Notes and Constraints

If auto.create.groups.enable is set to true, the consumer group status is EMPTY, and no offset has been submitted, the system automatically deletes the consumer group 10 minutes later.
If auto.create.groups.enable is set to false, the system does not automatically delete consumer groups. You can manually delete them.
If a consumer group has never committed an offset, the group will be deleted after the Kafka instance restarts.

Procedure

Log in to the console.
Click in the upper left corner to select the region where your instance is located.
Click Application > Distributed Message Service (for Kafka) to open the Kafka overview page.
In the navigation pane, choose Kafka Instances.
Click the desired instance to go to the instance details page.
In the navigation pane, choose Consumer Groups.
Click Create Consumer Group.

Set consumer group parameters by referring to Table 1 and click OK.

**Table 1** Consumer group parameters
Parameter	Description
Consumer Group Name	Enter 3 to 64 characters, starting with a letter or underscore (_). Use only letters, digits, periods (.), hyphens (-), and underscores (_). If a consumer group name starts with a special character, for example, a number sign (#), monitoring data cannot be displayed.
Description	Enter 0 to 200 characters.