RabbitMQ Monitoring Tool

What is RabbitMQ?

RabbitMQ is message-queuing software, also known as a messaging broker. A messaging broker acts as an intermediary between disparate systems needing to communicate with one another via messages. RabbitMQ gives these separate applications, devices, and platforms a common place to send or receive messages safely.

RabbitMQ is lightweight, scalable, and easy to deploy on various OSes and cloud environments. It also allows for many languages, although Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is the primary protocol RabbitMQ uses for messaging.

As a message broker, RabbitMQ supports IT administrators and technicians in achieving reliable and accurate message delivery. RabbitMQ also acts as a secure storage place for messages waiting to be received, which helps organizations understand where particular messages are and who owns them at any point in time.

RabbitMQ also helps servers respond quickly to message requests without performing resource-heavy operations and distribute messages or balance workloads to promote better resource allocation. As a result, RabbitMQ allows organizations to reduce their loads and improve delivery times within their network.

Along with supporting organizations by facilitating the efficient sending and receiving of critical messages, RabbitMQ enables organizations to respond appropriately to various types of message failures. This is especially important for organizations sharing proprietary or confidential data through messaging.

What are RabbitMQ performance issues?

RabbitMQ performance issues can cause messages not to be sent or received or received inaccurately. There are many kinds of RabbitMQ performance issues with the potential to occur when running RabbitMQ as a messaging broker:

Hardware failures or software crashes could occur anytime, stemming from both RabbitMQ and the server or client applications. RabbitMQ has an automatic data safety feature designed to help messages and queues cope with RabbitMQ restarts or hardware failures.

Connection and network failures may be the most common type of RabbitMQ issue. Firewalls could interrupt connections considered “idle” in RabbitMQ, which are actually waiting to be received. Logic errors could also result in connection issues, where messages are not delivered and need to be re-transmitted, forcing clients to establish new connections in order to recover.

While RabbitMQ message acknowledgments (acks) and publish confirms help stakeholders know if messages have been sent or received, they also can cause performance issues. Enabling manual acks on RabbitMQ can decrease throughput, contributing to various negative impacts on your network.

Long queues are also key contributors to RabbitMQ performance issues. Any queue longer than zero requires more processing overhead, which diminishes performance—and if you have thousands of active queues, the RabbitMQ server may slow down significantly. CPU and RAM usage can also be negatively affected by excessively long queues.

Lazy queues are another potential RabbitMQ performance issue in which messages are automatically stored on the disk. This minimizes RAM usage but prolongs throughput time.

RabbitMQ performance failures usually take much time to detect, troubleshoot, and resolve because many of these issues can go undetected, causing them to snowball into enormous problems by the time they’ve been discovered.

By supporting RabbitMQ performance monitoring, organizations can more easily spot and troubleshoot these critical performance issues. RabbitMQ monitoring tools like SAM can gather critical RabbitMQ metrics, perform health checks, run RabbitMQ diagnostics, and more easily detect irregular patterns and behaviors in your RabbitMQ cluster.

How does RabbitMQ monitoring work?

Monitoring RabbitMQ with SAM occurs via the SAM API poller template for monitoring RabbitMQ statistics. For this template, default thresholds are not automatically set. As a result, SAM users need to set their own thresholds according to their specific network requirements.

Along with establishing RabbitMQ thresholds, users can establish performance baselines on SAM which can then be used to trigger SAM alerts whenever there’s a deviation from these given baseline performances or when thresholds are crossed.

SAM is built to enact RabbitMQ performance monitoring through the following metrics:

• Number of messages delivered and acknowledged through RabbitMQ
• Rate of messages delivered and acknowledged per second
• Count of messages in exchanges confirmed
• Rate (per second) of messages in exchanges confirmed
• Rate (per second) and sum of messages delivered in response to basic.get—which consumes a significant amount of time and resources
• Count and rate (per second) of redelivered messages
• Count and rate (per second) of unroutable messages
• Count and rate (per second) of published messages
• Number of RabbitMQ consumers
• Number of RabbitMQ channels
• Number of RabbitMQ connections
• Number of RabbitMQ exchanges
• Number of used file descriptors
• Total number of messages
• Rate (per second) of number of messages
• Number and rate of messages ready for delivery
• Number and rate of unacknowledged messages
• Number of queues

What is the best way to monitor RabbitMQ queues?

You can monitor RabbitMQ queues with SAM by using the RabbitMQ Management Console. The SAM RabbitMQ Management Console lets you view RabbitMQ logs and message queues by accessing a simple website served by RabbitMQ itself and purge queues and delete garbage messages.

SAM leverages end-to-end visibility into your queues through the RabbitMQ Management Console and several other system metrics. SAM can continuously monitor these critical RabbitMQ statistics in real time, spot troubling trends and patterns, and bring them to your attention using agile and intuitive dashboards.

For more information on troubleshooting RabbitMQ with SAM, visit this page.