8.2. Managing RabbitMQ from the web console

Let’s look again at figure 8.1. As you can see, you have a navigation menu on top where you can browse several items like Connections, Exchanges, or Queues. Then the interface presents a general overview of the server status. You can see how many messages are ready to be delivered from all of your queues, how many are waiting to be acknowledged, and the total number of messages. This information can be useful when debugging your applications because, for example, the number of unacked messages tells you about the work your consumers are performing. If the number starts to get too high, that could be a sign that your consumers are getting slow. The good thing is that you can see this information right on the front page, without clicking 20 times to reach it. There’s more to it in the web console; in this section you’ll learn how to monitor the Erlang VM to find out the number of processes running on it, and also see how to export your configuration into JSON format, as well as how to import your configuration back to the server.

8.2.1. Monitoring the Erlang VM

If you scroll down the page a bit you’ll see some useful information about the Erlang node where RabbitMQ is running. As you saw in chapter 3, you can use the node name information to remotely connect to RabbitMQ and perform advanced administration operations on it. Another interesting value is the number of Erlang processes: if it reaches the limit, then RabbitMQ will stop working. You can increase the limit by modifying the +P option in the SERVER_ERL_ARGS from the rabbitmq-server init script.^[2] Other important values that you can see there are the installed versions of RabbitMQ and Erlang. Whenever you send a bug report to the RabbitMQ mailing list, you should attach those values because that will make it easier for people to diagnose the problem and be able to help you.

^[2] The file where this option may be found will vary depending on how you installed RabbitMQ. If you followed the installation instructions in chapter 1, then the rabbitmq-server script will be inside the sbin folder.