kafka consumer_error ai_generated true

org.apache.kafka.common.errors.GroupCoordinatorNotAvailableException

ID: kafka/group-coordinator-unavailable

Also available as: JSON · Markdown
82%Fix Rate
88%Confidence
3Evidence
2023-01-01First Seen

Version Compatibility

VersionStatusIntroducedDeprecatedNotes
3 active — — —

Root Cause

Consumer group coordinator broker not available. Cluster still starting up, or the coordinator broker is down.

generic

Workarounds

  1. 88% success Wait for cluster to fully start - coordinator election takes a few seconds 
    Add retry logic with backoff in consumer initialization

    Sources: https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/

  2. 85% success Check if the __consumer_offsets topic is healthy 
    kafka-topics.sh --describe --topic __consumer_offsets --bootstrap-server localhost:9092
  3. 90% success Verify all brokers are running 
    kafka-broker-api-versions.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

Dead Ends

Common approaches that don't work:

  1. Restart all consumers simultaneously 75% fail

    Mass restart triggers thundering herd problem; all consumers try to join at once causing repeated rebalances

  2. Delete the consumer group and recreate it 82% fail

    Deleting the group loses committed offsets; all consumers restart from earliest/latest