Hello - It appears that Pinot uses an empty kafka consumer group id (low level consumer) - however I think this is being deprecated from a kafka perspective as I see this in the kafka log... will this be a problem ?

Support for using the empty group id by consumers is deprecated and will be removed in the next major release

I dont think this will be a problem.. Pinot does not rely on kafka consumer group. We probably used empty group id because of the api available at that time. we should be able to use the new api without change in functionality.