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ActiveMQ Message Age Listener 🔗
Metadata associated with ActiveMQ Message Age can be found here. The relevant code for the plugin can be found in the ActiveMQ Message Age directory.
OVERVIEW 🔗
You can use ActiveMQ Message Age Listener to measure the age of messages in ActiveMQ queues and publish the results to SignalFx.
DESCRIPTION 🔗
ActiveMQ Message Age Listener actively inspects the messages that are waiting to be delivered in each queue, and therefore is especially useful for detecting messages that are “stuck” in ActiveMQ queues and unable to be delivered.
To monitor the general health of ActiveMQ, see the ActiveMQ integration for SignalFx.
FEATURES 🔗
Built-in dashboards 🔗
These dashboards accompany SignalFx’s ActiveMQ integration.
ActiveMQ Message Age: Shows the average age of messages in ActiveMQ queues.
REQUIREMENTS AND DEPENDENCIES 🔗
| Software | Version |
|---|---|
| ActiveMQ | 5.8.0 or later |
| Java | 1.5 or later |
| Maven | (match with Java version) |
SETUP 🔗
INSTALLATION 🔗
To access this tool, perform the following steps:
Download the SignalFx ActiveMQ Message Age Listener from https://github.com/signalfx/activemq-integration.
Modify
/activemq-integration/amq-message-age/propertiesto provide values that make sense for your environment, as described in Configuration, below.Run the tool as follows, replacing
path/to/with the location of the files you downloaded in step 1:cd path/to/activemq-integration/amq-message-age ./run.sh
CONFIGURATION 🔗
Configuring your endpoint 🔗
Before you can send metrics to SignalFx, you need to make sure you are sending them to the correct SignalFx realm. To determine what realm you are in (YOUR_SIGNALFX_REALM), check your profile page in the SignalFx web application, as follows:
- Click the avatar in the upper right.
- Click My Profile.
- If you are not in the
us0realm, you will need to set thesfx_hostconfiguration option, as shown below. - Set the
tokenconfiguration option to your SignalFx organization access token (YOUR_SIGNALFX_API_TOKEN). For more information on authentication, see the API’s Authentication documentation.
Configuration options 🔗
Supply values for the following properties in the /activemq-integration/amq-message-age/properties file.
| configuration option | definition | default value |
|---|---|---|
| path | Filesystem path to ActiveMQ executable | |
| token | SignalFx Organization Access Token | none |
| sfx_host | Host to which to transmit data | https://ingest.us0.signalfx.com |
| interval | Interval at which to measure message age, in milliseconds. | 3000 |
| host | URL at which to connect to ActiveMQ broker. | tcp://localhost:61616 |
| host_name | Name of this ActiveMQ host. This value appears in the dimension host in SignalFx. |
ActiveMQ_Host1 |
| broker_name | Name of this ActiveMQ broker. This value appears in the dimension broker in SignalFx. |
Broker1 |
USAGE 🔗
In some versions of ActiveMQ, messages sometimes get “stuck” in the queue, and message consumers won’t pick them up even if they have available capacity. This bug causes messages to never be delivered. Monitoring tools are typically unable to detect this condition due to a lack of visibility into the messages that never make it out of the queue.
This tool provides visibility into “stuck” messages in ActiveMQ by inspecting each enqueued message, calculating the average and maximum age of messages per queue, and reporting those metrics to SignalFx using our Java client library.
The built-in dashboard for this data makes it immediately visible when messages have been waiting too long to be delivered.
In this example, one queue has messages that are nearly 40 seconds old.
Using these metrics from inside each message queue, we can create intelligent detectors that alert when there’s a message stuck in the queue and unable to be delivered. For example, you can create a detector that fires when the oldest message in the queue has been getting older for at least 5 minutes. To build this, use the analytics function “Rate of change”, which lets us know how quickly a metric is changing.
This detector will alert when a message is unable to be delivered for more than 5 minutes.
In this example, rate of change tells us how much older the oldest message in each queue is getting each time we measure it. When this function is greater than 0, it tells us that a message is sitting in the queue, aging. If this continues for a long time, it could indicate that one or more messages is stuck and not being picked up.