Hello Kafka community members, I am reaching out to ask if there is a straightforward way to retrieve the timestamp of when a consumer group commits an offset for a topic partition.
>From what I understand, it is possible to obtain this information by scanning or continuously reading from the `*__consumer_offsets*` internal Kafka topic and storing the data externally. However, I am wondering if there might be a better or more recommended approach that I may have overlooked. *Use Cases* There are two main use cases I am considering: 1. This is for monitoring purposes. As a Kafka cluster maintainer, if a developer notices that their consumers stopped consuming records from a Kafka topic unintentionally, we can quickly use the last committed time to roughly estimate when the issue may start occurring. 2. This is for finer control over consumer group offsets retention. Currently, we manage consumer group offset retention using the ` *offsets.retention.minutes*` configuration. For some consumer groups, such as those consuming from retry or dead-letter-queue topics, which often have longer record retention and maybe infrequent new records, we would like to either never delete their committed offsets or set a longer retention period. We are considering implementing a service to handle this, but to do so, we would need a way to determine the last time a consumer group committed an offset. *Exploration* >From my initial research, it appears that this information is already managed by `*OffsetMetadataManager*` in `*OffsetAndMetadata*` ( https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/4.0.0/group-coordinator/src/main/java/org/apache/kafka/coordinator/group/OffsetAndMetadata.java#L56). However, regretfully, it seems that this value is not exposed when using the `*admin.listConsumerGroupOffsets*` method. If anyone has insights or could point me to any previous discussions on this topic, I would greatly appreciate it. I am also curious if there are specific reasons why the committed timestamp is not exposed via the admin client API. Thank you very much for your time, Pattarapon Kittisrisawai
