No timestamp in produced messages in Kafka-Net

Question

I'm using the Kafka-Net nuget package to do a basic POC for Kafka producing and consuming.

The problem I have however is that the messages it publishes to the topic don't seem to have any timestamps (when viewed in Kafka Tool latest version). Is this because the Kafka-Net package hasn't been updated to support the way timestamps are handled in newer versions of Kafka? Do I need to switch to using Confluent Kafka?

Messages are appended to the topic with correct offsets and payload, they just have a blank timestamp.

This is my code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Configuration;
using KafkaNet;
using KafkaNet.Model;
using KafkaNet.Protocol;

namespace KafkaProducer
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var brokerUri = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["BrokerUri"];

            Console.WriteLine("Enter the topic name to publish to");
            var topicName = Console.ReadLine();

            Console.WriteLine();
            Console.WriteLine($"Now publishing to topic {topicName}, enter messages separated by a carriage return");
            Console.WriteLine();

            var uri = new Uri(brokerUri);
            var options = new KafkaOptions(uri);
            var router = new BrokerRouter(options);
            var client = new Producer(router);

            while (true)
            {
                var payload = Console.ReadLine();
                if (payload == "exit") break;
                var msg = new Message(payload);                
                client.SendMessageAsync(topicName, new List<Message> { msg }).GetAwaiter().GetResult();
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

In Kafka,timestamp in messages are provided using property message.timestamp.type [CreateTime, LogAppendTime] which can be set at producer level or topic level.

A consumer will see the message timestamp when it sees the messages.

If you want to set this property at producer level then you need to check at Kafka-net API.

https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/#topicconfigs