[rabbitmq-discuss] Recommended ways of basic queue introspection

[Michael Bridgen]

>> Does RabbitMQ HTTP management API offer anything like this? If I am
>> willing to put together a small extension that will query Mnesia, are
>> there any caveats
>> or extension points or something I should be aware of? Finally, would it
>> make sense to try to extend HTTP API of the management plugin and
>> contribute back to it?
>
> The feature you are asking for is "queue browsing". RabbitMQ queues are
> strictly FIFO, precluding queue browsing. If you don't care about
> message order then you could attempt to emulate browsing by fetching and
> requeueing messages, but you say that is not possible in your case.

It's not queues being FIFO that is constraining, but the fact that reads 
are destructive.  For example, one can't peek at the first message in 
the queue, either -- which would be FIFO, but not destructive.

mkb