Whenever we develop an application, it's a common practice to develop a diagnostic infrastructure. This can be based on log files, SNMP traps, and many others.

RabbitMQ provides both standard log files and a built-in messaging-based troubleshooting solution.

We will see how to use these features in the first three recipes.

Sometimes, there are problems that prevent RabbitMQ from starting. In this case, it's mandatory to fix the problem directly on the server machine where the issue persists, and to reset the broker. We'll see this in the What to do when RabbitMQ fails to restart recipe.

However, debugging messages is a part of application development too. In this case, we need to know the exact information exchanged between RabbitMQ and its clients. It is possible to use a proxy built-in tool, part of the Java client API (see the Debugging RabbitMQ's messages recipe) or to use an advanced network monitor to examine the traffic, as we will see in the Debugging using Wireshark recipe.