Triage is an open-source consumer proxy for Apache Kafka that solves head-of-line blocking caused by poison pill messages and non-uniform consumer latency.
Once deployed, poison pill messages are identified and delivered to a dead letter store. By enabling additional consumer instances to consume messages, Triage uses parallelism to ensure that an unusually slow message will not block the queue.
The goal of Triage was to create a service that deals with head-of-line blocking in a message queue, while making it easy for consumer application developers to maintain their existing workflow.