An error that I see coming up frequently in the Kafka Connect community (e.g. mailing list, Slack group, StackOverflow) is: JsonDeserializer with schemas.enable requires "schema" and "payload" fields and may not contain additional fields or No fields found using key and value schemas for table: foo-bar You can see an explanation, and solution, for the issue in my StackOverflow answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/45940013/350613 If you’re using schemas.enable in the Connector configuration, you must have schema and payload as the root-level elements of your JSON message ( Which is pretty much verbatim what the error says 😁), like this: