Group and Kafka Communication Operations

Core runbook for distributed KafClaw communication.

Group Lifecycle

./kafclaw group join mygroup
./kafclaw group status
./kafclaw group members
./kafclaw group leave

Operational notes:

• Group state is persisted in settings (group_name, group_active).
• Heartbeat continuity metadata persists across restarts (group_heartbeat_*, group_heartbeat_seq).
• Startup reconciliation persists runtime_reconcile_* counters.

Kafka Configuration

Onboarding profile:

./kafclaw onboard --non-interactive --profile local-kafka \
  --kafka-brokers "broker1:9092,broker2:9092" \
  --group-name kafclaw \
  --agent-id agent-ops \
  --role worker \
  --llm skip

Direct config:

./kafclaw config set group.enabled true
./kafclaw config set group.groupName "kafclaw"
./kafclaw config set group.kafkaBrokers "broker1:9092,broker2:9092"
./kafclaw config set group.consumerGroup "kafclaw-workers"
./kafclaw config set group.agentId "agent-ops"

Security examples:

./kafclaw config set group.kafkaSecurityProtocol "SASL_SSL"
./kafclaw config set group.kafkaSaslMechanism "PLAIN"
./kafclaw config set group.kafkaSaslUsername "<username>"
./kafclaw config set group.kafkaSaslPassword "<password>"
./kafclaw config set group.kafkaTlsCAFile "/path/to/ca.pem"

Diagnostics (KShark)

Auto-detect from group config:

./kafclaw kshark --auto --yes

Explicit props:

./kafclaw kshark --props ./client.properties --topic group.mygroup.requests --group mygroup-workers --yes

Useful options:

• --json <file> export report
• --diag include traceroute/MTU diagnostics
• --preset use connection preset templates