Issue
After upgrading from Redpanda 25.2.x to Redpanda 25.3.1 , the Redpanda logs may have a lot of authentication warnings reported for audit_log_client
Detail
Lot of these messages are observed in the logs
WARN 2025-12-02 14:49:57,842 [shard 0:main] kafka/client - audit_log_client - cluster.cc:180 - Failed to dispatch metadata request - { node: 39 }, { error_code: sasl_authentication_failed [58] }: SASL authentication failed: security: Invalid credentials
Audit logging feature is working okay , but the Redpanda logs will continue to be spammed with these WARN messages
You may also seen an increase on metric redpanda_rpc_request_errors_totalsum(rate(redpanda_rpc_request_errors_total{}[$__rate_interval])) by ([[aggr_criteria]])
This issue was identified as a Redpanda bug : CORE-14903
Resolution/Workaround
Audit logging is working okay in this scenario, but to get round log message spam,
one additional rolling restart of the brokers after the upgrade will clear this state.
Redpanda bug : CORE-14903