High or growing consumer lag indicates processing bottleneck

A large consumer lag, or a quickly growing lag, indicates that the consumer is unable to read from a partition as fast as messages are available. This represents the number of consumer offsets between the latest message produced in a partition and the last message consumed.

Investigate three potential causes: slow consumer application (review consumer processing logic and resource allocation), slow network (check network latency between consumer and broker), or slow broker (review broker performance metrics and resource utilization).