As RabbitMQ instances run on top of the Erlang virtual machine, we can leverage the troubleshooting utilities provided by Erlang to troubleshoot problems occurring in the message broker. The variety of errors occurring may range from problems relating to starting/stopping the broker instance to performance issues—we already covered performance tuning and monitoring in the previous chapter; therefore, you can already apply that knowledge to troubleshooting. We will use a top-down approach to troubleshoot issues, as follows:
Check the status of a particular node.
Inspect RabbitMQ logs.
Check the RabbitMQ community mailing list or ask in the IRC chat.
Use Erlang utilities to troubleshoot a particular node.