Kafka consumer groups deletion

Question

I have a large number of consumer groups created in Kafka. When I check the status most of them are with Empty status and without active consumers.

I have two questions

Automatic deletion of consumer group is supported in Kafka and can we configure a time period to delete the empty consumer groups?
Is there any specific Kafka version which supports automatic deletion of empty Consumer groups?

[This](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64137375/kafka-delete-idle-consumer-group-id) might help. — Michael Heil, Dec 07 '20 at 14:45
You can look at the retention policy for the offsets topic. If there's no active consumers, groups get removed from that topic — OneCricketeer, Dec 07 '20 at 15:22
@OneCricketeer I tried to find this in the kafka documentation, but was not able to find any details regarding the deletion of groups. Can you please share a link where its mentioned "offsets.retention.minutes" and deleting of groups are mentioned. — Vineeth NG, Jul 05 '21 at 10:09
`offsets.retention.minutes` is [a broker config](https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/#brokerconfigs_offsets.retention.minutes). The docs dont say "group is deleted"; it says its offsets expire (which cause it not to be in the topic anymore, and therefore cannot be found when queried) — OneCricketeer, Jul 06 '21 at 16:16

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 07 '20 at 21:19

To delete empty consumer groups, you have 2 options:

Do nothing and wait offsets.retention.minutes. This settings defaults to 7 days. Groups without any members for this duration are automatically deleted. This mechanism exists since Kafka 0.8.2!
Use the delete consumer group API. This can be used via the Admin API's deleteConsumerGroups method or the kafka-consumer-groups.sh script. This API exists since Kafka 1.1.

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