Self Hosted Connectors(Kafka Connect) - How to recover from invalid connector configurations

Last updated: August 11, 2026

This applies to environments running the  Kafka-Connect version of Redpanda connectors in a self-hosted deployment.



See the following documentation for more information on these types of deployments:

Connector(kafka-connect) self-hosted - kubernetes

Connector(kafka-connect) self-hosted - docker

 
 

Problem 

 
When passing some invalid configurations to connectors ,

for example  incorrect TLS settings for a MM2 source connector,
it can cause the connector pod to crash and go into a CrashLoopBackOff state.. 



As the connect pod is down, a Redpanda admin cannot delete the bad connector config via Redpanda Console (HTTP 500 error ) or the Kakfa Connect REST API 





down-console.png








 

Solution



To resolve this, we can send a "tombstone' event to the Redpanda connectors internal topic _internal_connectors_configs that holds the connector configurations.



The tombstone event will prevent the incorrect configs from reloading again and the kafka connect instance will be able to run without crashing.



 The tombstone event needs to have a Key of   connector-

 

For example

  rpk topic produce _internal_connectors_configs  --key  connector-redpanda-s3-sink --tombstone



Where ..

the connector is named redpanda-s3-sink

Key used connector-redpanda-s3-sink