[rabbitmq-discuss] Monitoring delivery of async messages

Mon May 19 11:09:24 BST 2014

On 19 May 2014 at 13:08:33, Billy Stack (bs.stack at gmail.com) wrote:
> > Due to the importance of performance, we do not have any "acking"  
> going on - so all messages are effectively "fire and forget"

> We have a "reporting application" that subscribes to the messages  
> and creates reports.
> The problem is that these reports are also critical - i.e. we cannot  
> afford to have messages that go missing/get dropped etc
>  
> So the question I have is how do we go about monitoring the all message  
> data is in the reporting application i.e. what do people usually  
> do in a scenario like this?

Use publisher confirms and delivery confirmation. Both (primarily the former)
will have performance effect but that's just how things are in distributed
systems: throughput is at odds with confirmations, which is the only way
to know that the peer got your message.

> We were thinking of writing a database script that looks at the  
> database of the "web application" and "reporting application"  
> and compares results - but this certainly does not feel right!  

If you know how to perform repairs when the two get out of sync, this is not unreasonable. 
--  
MK  

Software Engineer, Pivotal/RabbitMQ