Kafka Deserializing Issue

I'm testing out the new Kafka connections and have it attached to one of the sample/default examples from Confluent's hosted environment for streaming stock transactions. I'm setting up a consumer query to read from the topic.

I keep getting this error once messages arrive:

"Error deserializing key/value for partition demo-0 at offset 0. If needed, please seek past the record to continue consumption."

There're a few challenges here:

  1. It's difficult to see more logs to understand what else might be happening under the hood, what's arriving from the Confluent server, etc.
  2. It seems to choke before it gets to a transform option, I tried returning an empty array and just log data, so it's happening earlier in the de-serialization phase.

There's a fair amount of nuance here between two systems in motion, but maybe someone here has an idea what's happening, how to debug better, etc. The next option I would imagine would be to use a transform on Kafka's side which has a non-zero cost to stand up additional resources to transform the data before it's sent, and in a real-world scenario, I don't know if I'd be likely to get that permission from the client to set up a new transformer.