🔌 Monitor Cluster and Node Health
- Track node state (running/stopped/partitioned)—detects node crashes, network partitions, or resource exhaustion
- Monitor disk space and memory alarms—RabbitMQ stops accepting messages when disk/memory thresholds exceeded
- Detect network partitions—split-brain scenarios where cluster nodes can't communicate, causing data inconsistency
- Validate quorum queue replication—ensure quorum queues maintain required replicas across cluster nodes
Real-World Example: Financial services company runs 3-node RabbitMQ cluster (RABBIT01, RABBIT02, RABBIT03) with quorum queues for trade confirmation messages (regulatory requirement for exactly-once processing, cannot tolerate message loss or duplicates). Saturday 2:14 AM Node3 disk fills to 96% (log rotation cron job fails Friday night, RabbitMQ debug-level logs consume 85 GB of 90 GB partition). No disk space monitoring configured, failure goes completely unnoticed (Node3 continues running, accepts messages until disk 100% full). Monday 6:07 AM peak trading volume (market open, 1,200 trades/minute), Node1 crashes from memory leak (custom RabbitMQ plugin memory leak consumes 16 GB RAM over weekend, JVM OutOfMemoryError kills node process). Cluster now: Node1 DOWN + Node2 RUNNING + Node3 RUNNING BUT DISK FULL. Quorum lost (need 2 of 3 healthy nodes for write quorum, Node3 cannot write due to disk full). Entire cluster offline for 18 hours: RabbitMQ refuses all connections ("insufficient quorum for queue 'trades.confirm.queue'"), trading platform cannot process any trades (manual fallback to phone/email confirmations, regulatory reporting delayed). Emergency RabbitMQ vendor support engagement ($28,000 weekend premium rate) + 4 senior DBAs × 18 hours × $145/hour = $10,440 labor + regulatory incident report filing ($5,200 legal review) = $95,000 total recovery cost + reputational damage with brokerage clients. Recovery procedure: expand Node3 disk partition (4 hours), clear old logs (1 hour), restart Node3 (30 minutes), patch Node1 memory leak (6 hours), restart Node1 (30 minutes), verify quorum (1 hour), replay 18 hours of queued messages from fallback system (5 hours). With Nodinite monitoring: Node3 disk space alert fires Saturday 2:17 AM ("Node3 disk 91% full exceeds threshold 85%, 8.1 GB remaining"). On-call operations clears old RabbitMQ debug logs + fixes cron job, disk usage drops to 62% by 3:02 AM. Node1 memory alert fires Friday 10:23 PM ("Node1 memory usage 13.8 GB exceeds threshold 12 GB, consuming 86% of 16 GB heap"). Engineering investigates custom plugin memory leak Friday night, deploys patched plugin Saturday 11:15 AM (during normal business hours, no weekend premium rate). Zero cluster downtime, zero trade processing interruption, $95,000 recovery cost eliminated.
Next Step
Ready to implement RabbitMQ monitoring? Start with the Installation Guide to set up the RabbitMQ Monitoring Agent, then configure your monitoring using the Configuration Guide.