How to monitor RabbitMQ?

Abstract

You have a few RabbitMQ deployments. How do you monitor them?

You have heard of the Grafana dashboards that team RabbitMQ maintains, maybe from this RabbitMQ Summit 2019 talk or from the official Monitoring with Prometheus & Grafana guide. But how do you actually set them up?

And what about the default metrics configuration? Can this be improved?

For speed and convenience, we set up K3S on a Linux host (we had some Equinix Metal credits that we put to good use) and then:

• We integrate Prometheus & Grafana with K3S, all running inside K3S.
• We set up RabbitMQ Grafana dashboards & deploy the RabbitMQ Cluster Operator, which makes deploying RabbitMQ on K8S as easy as it gets.
• We deploy a few RabbitMQ workloads and look at their behaviour via Grafana, paying special attention to memory pressure coming from the metrics system.

If your RabbitMQ nodes run many queues, channels & connections and you are using the default metrics configuration, this will help you understand how to optimise that.