Part 3: The RabbitMQ Management Interface - CloudAMQP

CloudAMQP

Part 3: The
RabbitMQ
Management
Interface
 2015-05-27

The RabbitMQ Management is a user-friendly interface

that let you monitor and handle your RabbitMQ server
from a web browser. Among other things queues,
connections, channels, exchanges, users and user
permissions can be handled - created, deleted and
listed in the browser. You can monitor message rates
and send/receive messages manually. This post gives
information about the different views that you can find
in the RabbitMQ Management.

RabbitMQ Management is a plugin that can be enabled for RabbitMQ. It

gives a single static HTML page that makes background queries to the HTTP
API for RabbitMQ. Information from the management interface can be

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useful when you are debugging your applications or when you need an
overview of the whole system. If you see that the number of unacked
messages starts to get high, it could mean that your consumers are getting
slow. If you need to check if an exchange is working, you can try to send a
test message.

A link to the RabbitMQ management interface can be found on the details

page for your hosted RabbitMQ solution, your CloudAMQP instance. If you
have RabbitMQ installed on localhost, go to http://localhost:15672/ to
find the management page.

All the tabs from the menu are explained in this post. Screenshots from the
views are shown for: Overview, Connections and channels, Exchanges,
Queues and Admin - users and permissions. A simple example will also
show how to set up a queue an exchange and add a binding between
them.

Concepts
In the prior posts Part 1: RabbitMQ for beginners - What is RabbitMQ?, the
default virtual host, user and permissions were used in the examples. In this
post, different views in the management interface are shown and all the
examples are still only working with the default values - still, there is some
important concept that is good to be familiar with.

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Users: Users can be added from the management interface and every
user can be assigned permissions such as rights to read, write and
configure privileges. Users can also be assigned permissions to
specific virtual hosts.
Vhost, virtual host: Virtual hosts provide a way to segregate
applications using the same RabbitMQ instance. Different users can
have different access privileges to different vhost and queues and
exchanges can be created so they only exist in one vhost.
Cluster: A cluster consists of a set of connected computers that work
together. If the RabbitMQ instance consisting of more than one node
- it is called a RabbitMQ cluster. A cluster is a group of nodes i.e., a
group of computers.
Node: A node is a single computer the RabbitMQ cluster.

OVERVIEW

The overview shows two charts, one for queued messages and one with the
message rate. You can change the time interval shown in the chart by
pressing the text (chart: last minute) above the charts. Information about all
different statuses for messages can be found by pressing (?).

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Queued messages
A chart of the total number of queued messages for all your queues. Ready
show the number of messages that are available to be delivered. Unacked
are the number of messages for which the server is waiting for
acknowledgment.

Messages rate
A chart with the rate of how the messages are handled. Publish show the
rate at which messages are entering the server and Confirm show a rate at
which the server is confirming.

Global Count
The total number of connections, channels, exchanges, queues and
consumers for ALL virtual hosts the current user has access to.

Nodes
Nodes show information about the different nodes in the RabbitMQ cluster
(a cluster is a group of nodes i.e, a group of computers), or information
about one single node if just one node is used. Here can information about
server memory, number of erlang processes per node and other node-
specific information be found. Info show i.e. further information about the
node and enabled plugins.

Port and contexts

Listening ports for different protocols can be found here. More information
about the protocols will be found in a later part of RabbitMQ for beginners.

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Import export definitions

It is possible to import and export configuration definitions. When you
download the definitions, you get a JSON representation of your broker
(your RabbitMQ settings). This can be used to restore exchanges, queues,
virtual hosts, policies, and users. This feature can be used as a backup. Every
time you make a change in the config, you can keep the old settings just in
case.

CONNECTIONS AND CHANNELS

A connection is a TCP connection between your application and the

RabbitMQ broker. A channel is a virtual connection inside a connection.

RabbitMQ connections and channels can be in different states; starting,

tuning, opening, running, flow, blocking, blocked, closing, closed. If a
connection enters flow-control this often means that the client is being rate-
limited in some way; A good article to read when that is happening can be
found here.

Connections
The connection tab shows the connections established to the RabbitMQ

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server. vhost shows in which vhost the connection operates, the username
the user associated with the connection. Channels tell the number of
channels using the connection. SSL/TLS indicate whether the connection is
secured with SSL.

If you click on one of the connections, you get an overview of that specific
connection. You can view channels in the connection and data rates. You
can see client properties and you can close the connection.

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More information about the attributes associated with a connection can be

found here in the manual page for rabbitmqctl, the command line tool for
managing a RabbitMQ broker.

Channels
The channel tab show information about all current channels. The vhost
shows in which vhost the channel operates, the username the user
associated with the channel. The mode tells the channel guarantee mode. It
can be in confirm or transactional mode. When a channel is in confirm
mode, both the broker and the client count messages. The broker then
confirms messages as it handles them. Confirm mode is activated once the
confirm.select method is used on a channel.

If you click on one of the channels, you get a detailed overview of that
specific channel. From here you can see the message rate on the number of
logical consumers retrieving messages via the channel.

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More information about the attributes associated with a channel can be

found here in the manual page for rabbitmqctl, the command line tool for
managing a RabbitMQ broker.

Exchanges
An exchange receives messages from producers and pushes them to
queues. The exchange must know exactly what to do with a message it
receives. All exchanges can be listed from the exchange tab. Virtual host
shows the vhost for the exchange, type is the exchange type such as direct,
topic, headers, fanout. Features show the parameters for the exchange (e.g.
D stand for durable, and AD for auto-delete). Features and types can be
specified when the exchange is created. In this list there are some amq.*
exchanges and the default (unnamed) exchange. These are created by
default.

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By clicking on the exchange name, a detailed page about the exchange are
shown. You can see and add bindings to the exchange. You can also
publish a message to the exchange or delete the exchange.

Queues
The queue tab show the queues for all or one selected vhost.

Queues have different parameters and arguments depending on how they

were created. The features column show the parameters that belong to the
queue. It could be features like Durable queue (which ensure that RabbitMQ
will never lose the queue), Message TTL (which tells how long a message
published to a queue can live before it is discarded), Auto expire (which tells
how long a queue can be unused for before it is automatically deleted), Max
length (which tells how many (ready) messages a queue can contain before
it starts to drop them) and Max length bytes (which tells the total body size
for ready messages a queue can contain before it starts to drop them).

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You can also create a queue from this view.

If you press on any chosen queue from the list of queues, all information
about the queue are shown like in the pictures that follow below.

The first two charts include the same information as the overview, but it just
shows the number of queued messages and the message rates for that
specific queue.

Consumers
Consumers show the consumers/channels that are connected to the queue.

Bindings
A binding can be created between an exchange and a queue. All active
bindings to the queue are shown under bindings. You can also create a new
binding to a queue from here or unbind a queue from an exchange.

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Publish message
It is possible to manually publish a message to the queue from "publish
message". The message will be published to the default exchange with the
queue name as given routing key - meaning that the message will be sent
to the queue. It is also possible to publish a message to an exchange from
the exchange view.

Get message
It is possible to manually inspect the message in the queue. "Get message"
get the message to you and if you mark it as "requeue", RabbitMQ puts it
back to the queue in the same order.

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Delete or Purge queue

A queue can be deleted by the delete button, and you can empty the
queue by pressing purge.

Admin
From the Admin view, it is possible to add users and change user
permissions. You can set up vhosts, policies, federation, and shovels.
Information about shovels can be found here:
https://www.rabbitmq.com/shovel.html and
http://www.cloudamqp.com/docs/shovel.html. Information about federation
can be found here: https://www.cloudamqp.com/blog/2015-03-24-
rabbitmq-federation.html

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Example
This example shows how you can create a queue "example-queue" and an
exchange called example.exchange.

Queue view:

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Add queue

Exchange view:

Add exchange

The exchange and the queue are connected by a binding called

"pdfprocess". Messages published to the exchange with the routing key
"pdfprocess" will end up in the queue.

Press on the

exchange or on the queue go to "Add binding from this exchange" or "Add

binding to this queue"

Publish a

message to the exchange with the routing key "pdfprocess"

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Queue

overview for example-queue when a message is published.

A lot of things can be viewed and handled from the management interface
and it will give you a good overview of your system. By looking into the
management interface, you will get a good understanding about RabbitMQ
and how everything is related.

Please email us at [email protected] if you have any suggestions or

feedback.

GUIDE - RABBITMQ FOR BEGINNERS

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Exchanges, routing keys and bindings

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