[rabbitmq-discuss] In queue statistics, what does 'count' represent?

Thu Jul 1 10:13:46 BST 2010

Hi,

I'm a MQ newbie, so this might well be a stupid question...apologies in
advance.

I'm looking into using RabbitMQ as part of a system monitoring solution
to allow me to have multiple 'dashboard' applications reading the same
data from various sources without polling, and without having to have
the dashboard apps deal with the (non-)availability and varying data
formats of the producers. Not to mention that some of the data sources
are embedded boxes with gutless network stacks.

I have a bunch of small python scripts running happily, feeding syslog,
SNMP and other data into RabbitMQ. I have a generic consumer that just
dumps to the screen, and I also have Graphite going, so far. Final goal
is a C# windows app, a screensaver, and other consumers to do live analysis.

It seemed that with all this monitoring stuff, knowing how many messages
were passing through the queues would be a good thing, so I installed
rabbitmq-status-1.7.0. It shows queues and connections OK, but the
'Count' column never goes up. I assumed it would be a count of messages
over all time.

Is this a fault with my understanding, or with rabbitmq-status? Can I
get what I'm after?

Thanks in advance for any illumination,

Howie