Understanding the Lag in Your Kafka Cluster

Apache Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service used by enterprises for high throughput, low latency data streaming applications. Consumer lag, the gap between the latest offset and consumer offset, can occur due to multiple reasons such as complex application logic, stuck consumers, slow message processing, uneven distribution of partitions among consumers, and rebalance events. Monitoring tools are available to help identify and address consumer lag issues in Kafka environments.