Introduction

Deletes records from a Kafka topic by advancing the partition offset, making older records inaccessible to consumers. The offset is moved relative to the latest known offset — for example, specifying 0 moves to the latest offset (skipping all unconsumed records), while specifying 10 keeps the last 10 records.

Warning: "Last records" refers to the topic's records, not the consumer's committed offset. Records deleted this way are permanently inaccessible.

Recommendation: Block consumers before deleting records (using Deny Access or a network block action) to control the timing. This lets you observe how the consumer reacts to a gap in records when access is restored.

Use Cases

• Simulate message loss by deleting records while a consumer is blocked, then observe how the consumer handles the offset gap.
• Test consumer recovery logic when records it expected to process no longer exist.
• Verify that downstream systems handle missing messages gracefully.

Parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
X from newest Offset	How many records to keep relative to the newest offset. 0 means advance to the latest offset, skipping all records. 10 means keep the 10 most recent records and delete everything before them. This is applied per partition.
Partition to issue delete records requests	One or more partition IDs to delete records from. Specified as a list of partition numbers (e.g., 0, 1, 2). Only the selected partitions are affected.