[rabbitmq-discuss] browse messages on a queue

[Kearney, Joe]

Hi,

I'm interested in finding or writing a tool to monitor messages on a rabbit queue, in particular to be able to view messages waiting on the queue. The use case is for occasional monitoring and debugging; I'm not suggesting using a browse/read-only function in normal processing.

This was raised on this mail group last July (http://lists.rabbitmq.com/pipermail/rabbitmq-discuss/2010-July/008004.html). Two pertinent quotes from that thread:

  > The only way you can get at the messages is through the normal AMQP methods that consume the messages (basic.consume and basic.get).  But these are not simple read-only operations of the type you might want for monitoring of the messages within a queue.

  > it's actually quite hard to come up with a sensible semantics for it that isn't too constraining on implementations

Has there been any progress on a built-in way to do this? Any thoughts on when/whether this might be introduced?
 
Alternatively, can you comment on a sensible way to fake it? The naive implementation that springs to mind is simply to get a few messages from the head of the queue in a transaction and roll it back. Clearly this is more heavyweight than it need be, but are there any reasons that this behaviour should really be avoided for manual monitoring, until such a time as real read-only browsing is supported?

Thanks,
Joe