[rabbitmq-discuss] Complaint on lack of easy stand-alone GUI tool to examine RabbitMQ queues/topics

Fri Nov 4 19:06:09 GMT 2011

I see this complaint mentioned by other people, but I see no
resolution.

RabbitMQ community does not have a quick GUI client that can be
installed to inspect queues, etc...  There needs to be a simple .net
program or java program to examine RabbitMQ.  No, the plugin isn't
simple enough as shown below.

My experience today:
1) Try to install RabbitMQ for use by VMware Cloud Director on the
RHEL 5.x server.
2) RabbitMQ install doesn't work since the erlang packages are not
available at Redhat repository, and our proxy prevents getting them
directly from erlang repository.  Eventually, we find an ftp site with
erlang-R12B-3.3.el5.kb.x86_64.rpm.
3) Erlang requires some gtkwx_core libraries which take 2 hours to
locate on the internet, because they are really called wxGTK.
Eventually the wxGTK-2.8.12-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm is found and
downloaded and installed.  Literally 4 hours are spent just getting
RabbitMQ installed on RHEL 5.7 64bit.
5) Now RabbitMQ is running and we configure VMware Cloud Director to
connect and it does, but where does it put the messages???  We don't
know where due to poor vmware documentation.  However, we need to
somehow get VMware Orchestrator to receive the messages.  What we need
is some nice graphical client to inspect the queues so we can
configure Orchestrator with the correct Queue names or Topic names...
It would also help to see the contents of the messages.
6) We can't use the plug-in for RabbitMQ, because erlang needs to be
R13 or higher.  There are no instructions for downloading R13 for RHEL
5.7, let alone any instructions for how we would upgrade the product
and not break anything.
7) All the other GUI tools require app servers, java servers, and
dozens upon dozens of downloads and installs in order to function.
Most "tools" are really api and code samples that do us no good unless
we want to spend a day or two programming and learning APIs that we
will never use again.
8) All we want to do is easily examine the queues and topics (without
spending forever reading command line documentation) so that we can
see what is happening and try to match up vCloud Director and
Orchestrator configuration.

Can somebody just create a quick graphical client for RabbitMQ that
doesn't require a lead programmer to install and configure?  We don't
want to create and code our own clients...

Enough ranting.  Seriously, somebody please be a hero.  Assume the
user is a complete AMQP novice with no time on their hands to study
usage of the tools.  We would love the tool to be packaged as an .msi
that installs right onto Windows XP or Windows 7.

Then we can get vCloud director to post a message, we can look at the
various queues or topics to find out where the message went and then
we can configure vCloud orchestrator to read the message and take
actions...

This lack of a basic tooling for RabbitMQ is very frustrating.