@srivatsan chakravarti You can also read all the messages that are in the retention period for your topic. That way you don't have to run your producer while you test your consumer. You can consume as many times you want from what was produced and it is still retained, usually 7 days, by default. You would have to use low level SimpleConsumer API to implement Java code that will emulate what you can do from the CLI with: bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --zookeeper localhost:2181 --topic test --from-beginning ... View more