RabbitMQ Alerting Without the Prometheus Stack.
Qarote ships built-in alert rules for the failure modes that actually happen: queues filling up, consumers disappearing, brokers going silent. Configure your first alert in under two minutes — no Alertmanager, no PromQL, no YAML.
Alert on what matters
Queue depth threshold
Alert when messages in a queue exceed N. A slow consumer or downstream outage can fill a queue in minutes — by the time your broker hits its memory watermark, the backlog is already deep. Catch it at the queue level before it becomes a broker-level incident.
Consumer count drop
Know immediately when consumers disconnect. A deployment, a crash, or a misconfigured restart policy all produce the same symptom from the broker's perspective: zero consumers on the queue. Distinguish a planned deploy from consumer lag before your queue starts filling.
Dead-letter queue spike
Alert when DLQ message count grows. Dead-lettered messages signal that something upstream is producing malformed payloads, or that a schema changed without a coordinated rollout. A DLQ spike that goes unnoticed for hours becomes a replay incident.
Broker unreachable
Get notified if Qarote loses contact with your RabbitMQ instance. A broker that stops responding to the management API is either overloaded, network-partitioned, or down — all three are production incidents. Works even if the management API itself has stopped responding.
Message rate anomaly
Alert when publish or delivery rates drop below expected baseline. Silent failures in async pipelines are the hardest to catch: no exception is thrown, no log is written, messages just stop flowing. A rate drop alert surfaces the failure before downstream services notice the silence.
Broker alarm triggered
Surface RabbitMQ's built-in memory and disk alarms as first-class alerts. RabbitMQ blocks all publishers the moment a memory or disk alarm fires — without monitoring, you discover this only when your application starts timing out on publish calls. Get notified the moment an alarm is raised, not after cascading failures begin.
From connection to alert in under two minutes
Connect your broker
Qarote reads from the RabbitMQ management API. No agent, no sidecar, no Prometheus exporter to deploy — agentless RabbitMQ monitoring without installing anything on your nodes.
Set your threshold
Pick the alert type, set the threshold, choose your notification channel. Works on any queue, vhost pattern, or all queues at once.
Get notified where you work
Alerts fire to Slack, email, or webhook. RabbitMQ Slack alerts and webhook notifications are available on the Developer plan. PagerDuty and OpsGenie are available on Enterprise.
Three components to monitor one queue depth metric
The Prometheus + Alertmanager + Grafana stack is powerful — and expensive to operate. Getting it working for RabbitMQ means enabling the `rabbitmq_prometheus` plugin, configuring a Prometheus scrape job, writing Alertmanager routing rules, and building Grafana dashboards. That is typically 2–4 hours of initial setup, and three separate services to maintain indefinitely.
Qarote gives you the same alert coverage as the Prometheus stack with none of the infrastructure. It connects directly to RabbitMQ's management HTTP API — no exporter, no scrape config, no TSDB. Alert rules ship pre-built for every common RabbitMQ failure mode, and the agentless architecture means there is nothing to install on your RabbitMQ nodes.
If you need full-stack observability across dozens of services, reach for Prometheus. If RabbitMQ is what you're monitoring, Qarote gets you there in two minutes with no moving parts to maintain.
Frequently asked questions
Does Qarote alerting require a paid license?
Basic alerting (queue depth, consumer count, broker reachability) is included in the free open-source MIT edition. Advanced alert types and notification channels (Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie) require a Developer or Enterprise license.
How is Qarote alerting different from RabbitMQ's built-in memory and disk alarms?
RabbitMQ's built-in alarms trigger broker-level flow control — they block all publishers when a memory or disk threshold is crossed. They are coarse-grained and binary: the entire broker is alarmed or it isn't. Qarote alerting is queue-level and continuous: you can alert on a specific queue's depth reaching a threshold, a consumer count dropping to zero, or a DLQ spiking — all before the broker itself reaches its alarm state.
Does Qarote use Prometheus under the hood?
No. Qarote reads directly from the RabbitMQ management HTTP API using standard HTTP polling. There is no Prometheus exporter, no scrape config, and no time-series database required. You do not need to enable the `rabbitmq_prometheus` plugin.
How quickly does Qarote detect a threshold breach?
Qarote polls your RabbitMQ broker every 15 seconds by default. Alert notifications fire within one polling interval of a threshold being crossed.
Can I run Qarote alerting in an air-gapped environment?
Yes. Qarote's license validation is entirely offline — no outbound connection required. Alerting works in air-gapped environments as long as Qarote can reach your RabbitMQ management API on your internal network.
Open source