RabbitMQ Health Check

RabbitMQ Health Check: Find the Failure Before It Finds You

A RabbitMQ health check is a senior engineer reading your cluster the way an incident would: version and patch position, topology and queue types, memory and disk alarms, partition handling, monitoring and client behaviour. You get written findings, a prioritised fix list, and the reasoning behind each one. Start with the free self-service check, or book the engineer-led assessment.

The only partner with direct RabbitMQ core team access

failure patterns checked on every cluster
10
min emergency SLA if we find something live
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enterprise customers
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Trusted for Mission-Critical RabbitMQ by Teams in Finance, Healthcare, Defense, Telecom, and More

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AceMQ is the Featured Authorized Partner for RabbitMQ

Named by the RabbitMQ Core Team

The Featured Authorized Partner for RabbitMQ — named by the engineers who build it

AceMQ is the Featured Authorized Partner for RabbitMQ, named by the RabbitMQ Core Engineering Team — the people who write and maintain the broker. That recognition covers RabbitMQ support, licensing and professional services, and it makes AceMQ the only RabbitMQ partner with a direct line to the core team. When an escalation needs an answer that is not in the documentation, it does not stop at a support tier.

You do not have to take our word for it — RabbitMQ lists AceMQ on its own site.

See AceMQ listed on rabbitmq.com (opens in a new tab)
Only
RabbitMQ partner with a direct line to the Core Engineering Team
Support · Licensing · Services
the full scope the partner status covers
Below 72 cores
the only provider globally licensing commercial RabbitMQ under Broadcom's minimum

Is This You?

You probably need this if…

  1. 01

    The cluster has been stable for a while and nobody can say why, or what would change that

  2. 02

    An upgrade, migration or platform move is coming and you want to know what it will hit

  3. 03

    Memory or disk alarms fire occasionally and get cleared without anyone finding the cause

  4. 04

    Classic mirrored queues are still in production and the deprecation date is a known unknown

  5. 05

    The people who designed the topology have moved on and the diagram is out of date

  6. 06

    An auditor or vendor questionnaire is asking about patch level, CVE exposure or DR posture

  7. 07

    You are choosing between support, managed services and an upgrade, and want the facts before the contract

Outcomes

Where you are now, and where you end up

Concrete state changes, not deliverable counts. This is what actually differs about your RabbitMQ estate when the engagement closes.

  1. Before

    The cluster's version, patch level and CVE exposure are known approximately, from memory.

    After

    A written inventory per node and per cluster, checked against the published CVE register, with what to patch first.

  2. Before

    Queue types, policies and HA settings were chosen at go-live and never revisited.

    After

    Every queue type and policy reviewed against the workload it carries, with the classic-to-quorum candidates listed.

  3. Before

    Alerts exist for whatever the last incident was. Nothing watches the next one.

    After

    A monitoring gap analysis against the ten failure patterns we see most, with the thresholds written down.

  4. Before

    The team knows something is fragile but cannot rank the risks or cost the fixes.

    After

    A prioritised remediation list with effort, risk and sequencing, usable as a plan or as a procurement basis.

Recognise your estate here? Get a quote for RabbitMQ health check from a senior engineer.

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Scope

What's covered

  • 01

    Version, Patch and CVE Position

    RabbitMQ and Erlang versions per node, distance from the current patch release, and exposure against every published advisory. Where a series is past community end of life, the realistic options are set out rather than assumed.

  • 02

    Topology and Queue Types

    Exchanges, bindings, vhosts and policies read against the workload. Classic, mirrored, quorum and stream queues checked for fit, with delivery limits, dead-lettering and overflow behaviour reviewed queue by queue.

  • 03

    Resources and Alarms

    Memory watermark, disk free limit, file descriptors, Erlang process and scheduler headroom. Sizing checked against sustained and peak rates, not the numbers guessed at go-live.

  • 04

    Clustering, Partitions and HA

    Node count and placement across failure domains, partition-handling mode, net_ticktime and heartbeat settings against the real network, and whether failover has ever actually been tested.

  • 05

    Monitoring and Alerting

    What is measured, what is alerted, and what would have caught the last three incidents. Prometheus and Grafana coverage checked against queue depth, unacked counts, connection churn and partition status.

  • 06

    Client Behaviour

    Prefetch, acknowledgement, connection and channel reuse, confirms and automatic recovery in the applications that talk to the broker. Most cluster symptoms start on the client side.

Want a senior RabbitMQ engineer to scope this with you? Get a quote or send us a message.

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The Engagement

How it actually runs

Every phase has a defined duration and a concrete artifact handed over at the end of it. You always know what stage you're in and what you've received.

  1. Phase 1Minutes

    Self-Service Check

    Run the free health check at assessment.acemq.com against your management API. It produces a report on cluster health, queue depths, consumer lag, node resources and policy compliance. Many teams stop here; the engineer-led assessment starts from this report rather than repeating it.

    You receive

    • Automated health report
    • Queue depth and consumer lag summary
    • Node resource and policy findings
  2. Phase 21 day

    Intake and Access

    We agree scope, clusters in and out, and the read-only access we need. Screen-share is the default; we take no system access and store no client data, which is why regulated teams are comfortable with it.

    You receive

    • Scope and cluster list
    • Access agreed, read-only
    • Incident history and known concerns collected
  3. Phase 31-4 weeks, by scope

    Assessment

    A senior engineer works through the six scope areas against your actual configuration, metrics and client code, with your team in the room where it helps. Findings are checked against the failure patterns we see most across 130+ estates.

    You receive

    • Inventory per node and cluster
    • Findings ranked by risk
    • Evidence for each finding
  4. Phase 4Walkthrough

    Findings and Plan

    A written report and a walkthrough with the engineer who did the work. Every finding carries the fix, the effort and the risk of leaving it, sequenced into a plan you can execute yourselves, with us alongside, or hand to a support or managed-services contract.

    You receive

    • Written findings report
    • Prioritised remediation plan with sequencing
    • Recommendation on support, managed services or upgrade, where relevant

RabbitMQ performance tuning review

A RabbitMQ performance tuning review checks five things first, because they explain most slow or unstable clusters: consumer prefetch, publisher confirms, queue type, memory and disk alarms, and connection churn. This is how to optimize RabbitMQ without guessing. Each item is read against your own metrics and client code, not against defaults.

What the performance tuning review checks, and why
AreaWhat we checkWhy it matters
Consumer prefetchThe prefetch value and acknowledgement mode of every consuming applicationValues from 100 to 300 usually give the best throughput without overwhelming consumers. A prefetch of 1 cuts throughput sharply. With manual acknowledgements and unlimited prefetch, unacknowledged messages grow memory use on the node the consumer is connected to.
Publisher confirms and batchingWhether publishers use confirms, and whether they wait on every message or handle confirms asynchronously or in batchesAsynchronous or batched confirms keep throughput up. AMQP transactions are far heavier: the documentation puts the cost at a factor of 250 in throughput.
Queue type choiceClassic, quorum and stream queues against the workload each one carriesClassic queues are not replicated. Quorum queues suit long-lived queues that need high availability. Very long backlogs, 5 million messages or more, and large fanouts suit streams.
Memory and disk alarmsMemory watermark and disk free limit against real usage, and whether alerts fire before the limitWhen memory or free disk crosses its limit, connections that publish are blocked. An alarm is a publisher outage.
Connection churnRates of opened and closed connections and channelsOpening and closing connections consistently above 100 per second likely indicates a suboptimal setup. Long-lived connections are the fix, with TCP stack tuning where short-lived clients are unavoidable.

The output is a ranked list of changes, each with the metric that will show whether it worked.

What a RabbitMQ audit and architecture assessment finds

We have delivered 20+ assessments and architecture reviews since mid-2025 across RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis and IBM MQ, and most engagements start with an assessment. A RabbitMQ audit regularly turns up the same kinds of finding:

  • Missing publisher confirms — publishers cannot tell whether the broker accepted a message.
  • Classic queues without a replication policy — a node loss takes the queue's messages with it.
  • Alert thresholds set too low for the disk free limit — the warning leaves no time to act before publishers are blocked.
  • LDAP in the client authentication path — a directory outage becomes a broker outage.
  • No monitoring — the cluster is found to be unhealthy by its users.
  • Version or runtime past end of life — no patch route for the broker or for Erlang/OTP.
  • Shared clusters — one team's workload sets the failure risk for every other team.

What we do not do

We deliver assessments remotely, guided by your engineers over screen share. We do not access your environments or code, and any remediation work beyond the assessment is time and materials.

Ready to talk RabbitMQ? Get a quote or send us a message.

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Customer Success

Real RabbitMQ Results

See how enterprises trust AceMQ for their most critical RabbitMQ workloads.

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FAQ

Questions about RabbitMQ health check

What is a RabbitMQ health check?

An engineer-led review of a production RabbitMQ estate: version and CVE position, topology and queue types, resource alarms and sizing, clustering and partition handling, monitoring coverage and client behaviour. The output is a written findings report with a prioritised fix list. It is distinct from the broker's built-in health probes, which report whether a node is up, not whether the cluster is designed to stay up.

Is this the RabbitMQ health check URL or API endpoint?

No. RabbitMQ exposes HTTP health endpoints under /api/health/checks/ (for example alarms, local-alarms, node-is-quorum-critical) and the rabbitmq-diagnostics command for liveness and readiness probes. Those tell an orchestrator whether a node is serving. This page is the assessment service that reads the whole estate and tells you what will break next.

Can we run a RabbitMQ health check ourselves?

Yes. The free self-service check at assessment.acemq.com runs against your management API and returns a report on cluster health, queue depths, consumer lag, node resources and policy compliance, with nothing to install. The engineer-led assessment picks up where that report stops: the reasoning, the client-side causes and the plan.

How long does a RabbitMQ health check take?

The self-service check takes minutes. The engineer-led assessment takes one to four weeks, depending on how complex the estate is, which areas you want covered, and how many problems we find along the way. Intake is a day, and the findings walkthrough follows the assessment. We give a fixed timeline once we know the cluster count and focus areas.

What does a RabbitMQ assessment cost?

It is priced on the number of clusters and the depth of review, not per node or per queue. Send the cluster count and we will come back with a scoped price within 24 hours. Where the assessment leads into a support or managed-services contract, the assessment is folded into onboarding rather than charged twice.

What do you find most often?

The same handful of patterns across most estates: classic mirrored queues carrying workloads that need quorum queues, unbounded prefetch and slow acknowledgements, connection and channel churn from client code, a partition-handling mode that was never set, alerting that only covers the last incident, and a version several patch releases behind with disclosed CVEs. The failure-patterns guide on our resources page lists all ten with the fixes.

Do we need to be an AceMQ support customer?

No. The health check is a standalone engagement. It is also the first phase of every support and managed-services onboarding, so if you go on to either, the work is not repeated.

Let's talk

Book a RabbitMQ Health Check

Tell us how many clusters you run. We will scope the assessment and come back with a timeline and price within 24 hours. Or run the free self-service check first.

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Get in Touch

Talk to a RabbitMQ Expert

Send us a message and we'll follow up within one business day — or book a free 30-min consultation directly.

305-204-2607
info@acemq.com
66 W. Flagler St. 9th Floor
Miami, FL 33130

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