defect
Currently, an empty message (value = null) on a Kafka topic in the consumer leads to a NullpointerException and thus blocks further message processing.
Cause:
The ConsumerDispatcher logs the processing of each message ('record') and forwards the content (record.value()) of the message to the KafkaStringLogWriter. In the writeMetaData() method, a NullpointerException occurs when accessing the value ('message') of the message.
The message then remains on the topic and the consumer tries to process it again and again, which always leads to the same problem. The processing of further messages is thus blocked.