Apache Kafka stores the message with offset. The following are several ways the messages can be retrieved with time;
...
--broker-list <hostname:port,..., REQUIRED: The list of hostname and hostname:port> port of the server to connect to.
--max-wait-ms <Integer: ms> The max amount of time each fetch request waits. (default: 1000)
--offsets <Integer: count> number of offsets returned (default: 1)
--partitions <partition ids> comma separated list of partition ids. If not specified, will find offsets for all partitions (default)
--time <Long: timestamp in milliseconds / -1(latest) / -2 (earliest) timestamp; offsets will come before this timestamp, as in getOffsetsBefore > > see the example getLastOffset method under Kafka Low level consumer API
--topic <topic> REQUIRED: The topic to get offsets from.
...
The low level consumer API is stateless and provides fine grained control over the Kafka broker and the consumer.It allows consumers to set the message offset with every request raised to the broker and maintains the metadata on consumer's end. The topicsMetadata() method of kafka.javaapi.TopicMetadataResponse class is used to find the topic of interest from the lead broker. For message partition reading, the kafka.api.OffsetRequest class defines two constants: EarliestTime and LatestTime, to find the beginning of the data in the logs and the new messages stream.
The following is the simple consumer API class diagram
...