Monitor RabbitMQ metrics in ElasticSearch

One of the reasons we are using ElasticSearch is to bring all the metrics from multiple systems together in one place. One of the systems we want to monitor is our RabbitMQ cluster. Let's walk through the steps to get our RabbitMQ metrics send to ElasticSearch and available in Kibana.

The RabbitMQ Metrics Integration

Open up Kibana and click on the hamburger icon in the left corner. This will open up a side menu with a big ‘Add integrations’ button at the bottom.

Hit this button to go to the Integrations overview page. Here you can see the list of all available integrations.

Let’s search for “rabbitmq”. We get 2 results back.

Click on the ‘RabbitMQ Metrics’ integration to go to the installation instructions.

Install MetricBeat on Windows

The RabbitMQ metrics integration is part of MetricBeat. MetricBeat is a lightweight shipper that you can install on your servers to periodically collect metrics from the operating system and from services running on those servers (or containers).

Let’s first download MetricBeat and extract the zip file on the server(s) where your RabbitMQ cluster is running. Go to the folder where you extracted the zip and run the following command

PS C:\Windows\system32> cd "C:\Program Files\Elastic\Beats\8.2.0\MetricBeat"

PS C:\Program Files\Elastic\Beats\8.2.0\MetricBeat> .\install-service-metricbeat.ps1

The output should look like this:

Status Name DisplayName

------ ---- -----------

Stopped metricbeat metricbeat

Next step is to enable the rabbitmq module to start collecting information from our RabbitMQ cluster.

PS C:\Program Files\Elastic\Beats\8.2.0\MetricBeat> .\metricbeat.exe modules enable rabbitmq

Enabled rabbitmq

Almost there! As a last step we still need to create the necessary indices. This can be done through the following command:

PS C:\Program Files\Elastic\Beats\8.2.0\MetricBeat> .\metricbeat.exe setup

Overwriting ILM policy is disabled. Set `setup.ilm.overwrite: true` for enabling.

Index setup finished.

Loading dashboards (Kibana must be running and reachable)

Loaded dashboards

On the installation instructions page, we can check that everything is working by hitting the ‘Check data’ button.

Now we can click on the RabbitMQ Metrics Dashboard button to go to the dashboard.

Here we can find some default information about our cluster. Of course you are free to customize this dashboard to your needs.

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