The last task required to ensure a smooth production ride with RabbitMQ is the same as that of any other system; proper monitoring and alerting should be put in place in order to stay abreast of what's happening in the running brokers. In essence, the two questions you need to ask yourself are: what to monitor and how to monitor it? Let's take time to answer these two questions in the context of Clever Coney Media. We won't be discussing the monitoring of the machines (hardware or virtual) on which the brokers run, but will be focusing on the RabbitMQ specifics only.

Let's tackle the "how" first. There are two main ways to retrieve live information from a RabbitMQ broker: via the rabbitmqctl command-line tool and via the REST API exposed over HTTP by the management console. Any decent monitoring system will be able to use one or the other in order to collect metrics and report them to its central aggregation, charting, and alerting engine.