Help Center/ Distributed Message Service for Kafka/ User Guide/ Managing Consumer Groups/ Creating a Kafka Consumer Group
Updated on 2026-07-14 GMT+08:00
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Creating a Kafka Consumer Group

A consumer subscribes to a topic. A consumer group is a logical collection of consumers. Kafka uses consumer groups to balance messages and manage the consumption progress. Within a consumer group, each consumer can consume multiple partitions at the same time, but each partition can be consumed by only 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

  1. Log in to the Kafka console.
  2. Click in the upper left corner to select the region where your instance is located.
  3. Click the desired instance to go to the instance details page.
  4. In the navigation pane, choose Instance > Consumer Groups.
  5. Click Create Consumer Group.
  6. 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.

    View the new consumer group in the consumer group list.

Related Documents

Parent topic: Managing Consumer Groups