title: Kafka how to read from __consumer_offsets topic
body: <p>I'm trying to find out which offsets my current High-Level consumers are working off. I use Kafka 0.8.2.1, with <strong>no</strong> "offset.storage" set in the server.properties of Kafka - which, I think, means that offsets are stored in Kafka. (I also verified that no offsets are stored in Zookeeper by checking this path in the Zk shell: <code>/consumers/consumer_group_name/offsets/topic_name/partition_number</code> )</p>
  
  <p>I tried to listen to the <code>__consumer_offsets</code> topic to see which consumer saves what value of offsets, but it did not work... </p>
  
  <p>I tried the following:</p>
  
  <p>created a config file for console consumer as following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>=&gt; more kafka_offset_consumer.config 
  
   exclude.internal.topics=false
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and tried two versions of the console consumer scripts:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#1:
  bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --consumer.config kafka_offset_consumer.config --topic __consumer_offsets --zookeeper localhost:2181
  
  #2
  ./bin/kafka-simple-consumer-shell.sh --topic __consumer_offsets --partition 0 --broker-list localhost:9092 --formatter "kafka.server.OffsetManager\$OffsetsMessageFormatter" --consumer.config kafka_offset_consumer.config
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Neither worked - it just sits there but does not print anything, even though the consumers are actively consuming/saving offsets.</p>
  
  <p>Am I missing some other configuration/properties ?</p>
  
  <p>thanks!</p>
  
  <p>Marina</p>