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Message queues

Message queues operate as a lightweight storage represented by queues or topics.

  • Producer services send messages to queues or topics
  • Consumer services receive messages from queues or topics asynchronously

Decoupled services are common in applications built with microservices, and events are used to communicate between those services, making it important to have full observability into the performance of message queues.

For details, see Queue concepts.

Queues in Dynatrace

Dynatrace OneAgent automatically detects queues and topics when they’re used in service-to-service communications, resulting in queue entities in Dynatrace.

In the Dynatrace menu, go to Queues to list all detected queues and topics.

  • For all queues and topics, Dynatrace OneAgent measures the number of Incoming messages and Outgoing messages. By monitoring these metrics, you can catch unbalanced message processing that could result in severe problems, such as queue overflows, and prevent them by scaling queues quickly or maintaining failover processes.
  • Select the Name of a specific queue or topic to display the analytics view for the selected queue or topic, with enhanced troubleshooting capabilities to gain additional insight into related anomalies.

Queues list

Basic concepts

Queue concepts

Configuration

Configuration

IBM MQ tracing

Tags and management zones

Monitoring

Analytics views

FAQs

What is the difference between a queue and a topic?
  • Queue: a single message is received by exactly one consumer (point-to-point model) even when more consumers are connected to the queue.
  • Topic: a single message is published to all subscribers of that topic (publish-subscribe model).
Which messaging clients are compatible with OneAgent?

Dynatrace OneAgent supports various messaging clients. To find out the compatible clients, see Technology support.

Is a specific license required that OneAgent detects queues and topics?

No. Queues and topics can be detected when OneAgent is running in Full-Stack Monitoring mode.

Can OneAgent detect queues and topics in Infrastructure Monitoring mode?

No. Queues and topics can only be detected when OneAgent is running in Full-Stack Monitoring mode.

Can extensions detect queues and topics?

Yes, but the queues and topics detected by extensions don't result in queue entities. Extensions can only add technology-specific metrics to queue entities created by OneAgent. This is why queues and topics detected by extensions aren't visible in the Queues and topics list.

Why is there sometimes a difference between the number of queues or topics detected by OneAgent and by extensions?

While extensions detect queues and topics both on the client-side and on the server-side, OneAgent detects them exclusively on the client-side. Additionally, not all queues and topics might be used by clients or can be accessed by OneAgent.

How can I define an automatically applied tag for queue entities?

Visit the related section on the Tags and management zone page.

How can I add queue entities to existing management zones?

Visit the related section on the Tags and management zone page.