Thanks very much for your reply. 
It does sound similar to what I'm seeing, however I'm producing to Kafka not consuming from Kafka. I see Apache logs stream by from a tail -F, but nothing gets picked up by LogStash....unless I run it from the command line.
I checked my Kafka logs, and I didn't have any "reset offset" messages. I never had LogStash crash on me either, just never process any events!
I did poke around in the github pages for the Puppet module, and the version compatibility table says the current version works with up to 1.4.2, so there could be something that needs updating in the module to make it compatible with versions >=1.5.0. I asked a similar question on the GitHub page as well, in hopes that the author might chime in and see if that might be the case.
Again, thanks for your time.
Chris