title: Kafka - How to check if the consumer is alive, if not how to bring back the consumer to a running state?
body: <p>I'm currently working on a kafka java project. I'm new to it and I'm finding it difficult to understand few basic concepts associated with Kafka Producer/Consumer design.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Say, I have a topic with single partition and I have a producer writing to it and a consumer consuming from the topic. If I deploy multiple instances of the same application, each instance will be running a consumer of it's own. In this case, since all the consumers belong to the same groupId, will the messages be equally distributed among the consumers running on multiple instances?</p></li>
  <li><p>How can I check if a consumer is alive in a periodic fashion from the application?.</p></li>
  <li>If one/all consumers goes down how do I restart/bring it back to running state?</li>
  <li>What's the best way to implement a long-running consumer in java?.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Kindly provide clarifications for the above queries.
  Please do correct me, if any/all of my assumptions/understanding is wrong.
  I know that I have not shared any code samples, since these are conceptual questions. I can share the code snippets, if required.</p>