How to see the retention for a particular topic in kafka

I want to see the retention period set for a particular topic. Is there any command? I tried with

bin/kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper hostname:2181 --alter --config retention.ms=172800000 --topic <topic_name>

for deleting 2 days old data. But I want to see how many days are set in the retention period for all the topics.


If you have altered a topic and want to view the topic configuration the following command will be helpful

kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper localhost:2181 --describe --topics-with-overrides

This will describe only the topics along with configurations that have configurations set that differ from the cluster defaults.

If you want to view the configurations for all topic Either you can view these properties log.retention.hours or log.retention.ms in server.properties in kafka config directory.


See config 'log.retention.hours' in Kafka Doc:

The number of hours to keep a log file before deleting it (in hours), tertiary to log.retention.ms property

Default value is 168 hours which is 7 days.


Alternative ways:

  1. use call sh-command through a container
docker run --rm -it confluentinc/cp-kafka:latest sh -c "kafka-topics --zookeeper 11.22.33.44:5555 --describe --topic topic-name"

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  1. use Kafka Tool

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Take into account that it would be displayed just params different from default values.

At the example above, the retention.ms is 14 days, when default one is 7 days.


Simply the below command will help

kafka-topics.sh --bootstrap-server server_ip:9092 --describe --topic topic_name

Along with other infos , it will print delete.retention.ms.

A sample output will be

Topic:TOPIC NAME PartitionCount:6 ReplicationFactor:1 Configs:compression.type=gzip,segment.bytes=1073741824,retention.ms=100,max.message.bytes=100001200,delete.retention.ms=100000

Topic: TOPIC NAME   Partition: 0    Leader: 2   Replicas: 2 Isr: 2
Topic: TOPIC NAME   Partition: 1    Leader: 3   Replicas: 3 Isr: 3
Topic: TOPIC NAME   Partition: 2    Leader: 1   Replicas: 1 Isr: 1
Topic: TOPIC NAME   Partition: 3    Leader: 2   Replicas: 2 Isr: 2
Topic: TOPIC NAME   Partition: 4    Leader: 3   Replicas: 3 Isr: 3
Topic:  TOPIC NAME  Partition: 5    Leader: 1   Replicas: 1 Isr: 1