There are two main ways to retrieve live information when monitoring a RabbitMQ broker: one through the rabbitmqctl command-line tool and another through the REST API exposed over HTTP by the management console.
Any monitoring system can use these tools to collect metrics and report them to the log, analytics, reporting, and alert frameworks. Information could be pushed to external logging services for further analysis, as an example.
Since CC installed the management console, as described in Chapter 1, A Rabbit Springs to Life, the team opts to use the rich, well-documented API over the command line. RabbitMQ provides documentation at the http://localhost:15672/ API on any node that has the management plugin installed. It is possible to retrieve the same raw metrics over the command line, albeit without graphics.