we have Kafka consumers running on two websphere servers under same cluster. Kafka consumers are configured with auto offset commit and using same consumer group, and polling every 5 seconds. The problem is, consumers from both servers are consuming the same message twice at the same time. Is there any way to control this duplicate message consumption?

Tried to start both servers separately with some time difference, however this doesn't help to address the problem completely, as after couple of days the same duplicate consumption problem reoccurs.