- Track depth trends over time (hourly/daily peaks)—identify
📊 Prevent Queue Backlogs with Depth Monitoring
- Set per-queue depth thresholds (e.g., alert when >500 messages or >80% max depth)—prevents memory exhaustion, message expiration
- Track depth trends over time (hourly/daily peaks)—identify processing slowdowns before they cascade into failures
- Monitor local, remote, and alias queues—ensures visibility across entire queue network including cluster queues
- Alert on sustained high depth (not just transient spikes)—reduces false positives from normal burst traffic
Real-World Example: Automotive parts distributor production order queue ORDERS.IN
normally processes 50-100 messages/hour during business hours (8 AM-6 PM), peaks to 180 during lunch rush (12-1 PM when dealers submit bulk orders). Friday 9:14 PM, OrderFulfillmentService consumer crashes from NullReferenceException
(inventory lookup returns null for discontinued part SKU, exception handler missing, service terminates). Queue depth climbs from 62 → 500 in 22 minutes (evening online orders from West Coast dealers, 3× normal traffic). Traditional monitoring: failure unnoticed until Monday 7:45 AM when warehouse manager reports "pick lists empty, no orders generated over weekend". 58-hour detection delay, 4,200 orders backed up in queue. Emergency response required: 5 engineers mobilized from weekend plans, 4 hours troubleshooting NullReferenceException + deploy hotfix with proper null handling × $135/hour = $27,000 engineering cost + $38,000 expedited weekend shipping (customers promised Saturday delivery, now Monday late, absorb FedEx Saturday premium + Monday air freight to recover) + $18,500 customer compensation (285 angry dealers receive free shipping vouchers for next 3 orders) = $83,500 total incident cost. With Nodinite monitoring: Alert fires Friday 9:36 PM ("ORDERS.IN queue depth 523 exceeds threshold 500"). On-call engineer receives PagerDuty page, investigates OrderFulfillmentService logs via Nodinite correlation, identifies NullReferenceException
for SKU "BRAKE-PAD-X240" (discontinued part still in dealer catalog), deploys hotfix with null check + "part discontinued" error message by 10:08 PM. Service restarts, backlog 4,200 orders processed in 35 minutes (queue depth returns to 71 by 10:43 PM). Zero weekend disruption, zero Monday warehouse crisis, $83,500 incident cost eliminated.