Message queues

The New Relic Ruby agent supports the Bunny RabbitMQ client library, giving you insight into the performance of your message processing, for both incoming and outgoing messages.

The APM UI shows transactions initiated via RabbitMQ message receipt (subscribe/consume messages) as Message background tasks. Message creation via RabbitMQ also appears in transaction traces.

Requirements

Requires New Relic Ruby agent version 4.3.0 or higher. Instrumentation is automatic for supported versions of Bunny AMQP, and requires no additional configuration.

Performance improvements with background tasks

One way to increase responsiveness of web applications is to delegate work to background processes. Message queues are commonly used for this inter-process communication.

In the context of message queuing systems, applications typically interact with message brokers to send and receive messages. The RabbitMQ Bunny client library allows Ruby applications to interface with message brokers that implement the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP).

New Relic's Ruby agent shows messages sent and received using the RabbitMQ client library. With this visibility, you can see details including:

• Number of messages produced by your app
• Time your app spends publishing messages
• Time your app spends processing "consumed" messages

APM conveniently groups and reports operations that interact with queues. By analyzing this information, you can more easily identify bottlenecks and areas for performance improvement in your message passing architecture.

Queue operations

Supported entry points for queue operations appear as Put (publish a message) or Take (receive a message) in APM's user interface.

View in New Relic UI

Message queue operations are visible in several places in the APM UI:

Transactions page

Queue operations appear on APM's Transactions page for the selected app. The Put and Take metrics appear in the Breakdown table and are categorized as MessageBroker metrics. Here is an example:

Transaction traces also provide additional details for messages.

You can select transaction traces from the app's Summary or Transactions pages in APM.

Transaction trace summary page

The Transaction trace summary page may show Put and Take operations in the Slowest components section. For example:

Transaction trace messages tab

The Transaction trace page includes a dedicated Messages tab that shows a summary of the message activity that occurred as part of the transaction. Here is an example:

For more help