The kickdrum app will regularly produce Kafka messages on Roundtable's SQuaRE Events service. Consumers can monitor this "beat" topic to ensure that they haven't silently lost a connection with a broker.

The reason for this issue seems to be https://github.com/aio-libs/aiokafka/issues/575

So we can either wait for that upstream issue to be resolved, or we can use kickdrum to work around it.