RabbitMQ (Message) Tracing Plugin

This is an opinionated tracing plugin that extends RabbitMQ management UI. It logs messages passing through vhosts with enabled tracing to a log file.

This was migrated to https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server

This repository has been moved to the main unified RabbitMQ "monorepo", including all open issues. You can find the source under /deps/rabbitmq_tracing. All issues have been transferred.

Usage

This plugin ships with RabbitMQ. Enabled it with rabbitmq-plugins enable, then see a "Tracing" tab in the management UI.

Configuration

Configuration options are under the rabbitmq_tracing app (config section, if you will):

• directory: controls where the log files go. It defaults to "/var/tmp/rabbitmq-tracing".
• username: username to be used by tracing event consumers (default: <<"guest">>)
• password: password to be used by tracing event consumers (default: <<"guest">>)

Performance

TL;DR: this plugin is intended to be used in development and QA environments. It will increase RAM consumption and CPU usage of a node.

On a few year old developer-grade machine, rabbitmq-tracing can write about 2000 msg/s to a log file. You should be careful using rabbitmq-tracing if you think you're going to capture more messages than this. Any messages that can't be logged are queued.

The code to serve up the log files over HTTP is not at all sophisticated or efficient, it loads the whole log into memory. If you have large log files you may wish to transfer them off the server in some other way.

HTTP API Endpoints

GET            /api/traces
GET            /api/traces/node/<node>
GET            /api/traces/<vhost>
GET            /api/traces/node/<node>/<vhost>
GET PUT DELETE /api/traces/<vhost>/<name>
GET PUT DELETE /api/traces/node/<node>/<vhost>/<name>
GET            /api/trace-files
GET            /api/trace-files/node/<node>
GET     DELETE /api/trace-files/<name>    (GET returns the file as text/plain)
GET     DELETE /api/trace-files/node/<node>/<name>    (GET returns the file as text/plain)

Example for how to create a trace using RabbitMQ HTTP API:

curl -i -u guest:guest -H "content-type:application/json" -XPUT \
     http://localhost:15672/api/traces/%2f/my-trace \
     -d'{"format":"text","pattern":"#", "max_payload_bytes":1000,
         "tracer_connection_username":"guest", "tracer_connection_password":"guest"}'

The format and pattern fields are mandatory.

tracer_connection_username and tracer_connection_password control what credentials the tracing connection will use. Both are optional and default to the configured plugin values.

max_payload_bytes is optional (omit it to prevent payload truncation).