Ask HN: How are you monitoring SQS dead letter queues in production?

2•Mooshux•2h ago

Asking because I've spent the last month talking to engineering teams about this. Nobody does it the same way. Hand-rolled CloudWatch alarms, Lambda pollers, cron jobs. Some teams just don't bother.

Most are also watching the wrong metric. NumberOfMessagesSent won't fire when SQS automatically moves failed messages to the DLQ. You want ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible. Queue depth alone still misses slow drains too. Messages can age out silently before anyone notices, especially if your DLQ retention period is shorter than your source queue's.

What's actually working out there?

Comments

mikece•2h ago

The best way to monitor the DLQ is by setting up CloudWatch alarms on the ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible metric. Set an alarm to trigger when the message count exceeds 0, paired with an SNS notification to alert developers via email, Slack, teams, Pager Duty, or whatever your preferred mode of being alerted is.

Mooshux•1h ago

This is exactly where we started too. ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible is solid for catching buildup. Where we kept getting surprised was message age. A handful of messages can sit there for days while the count alarm stays completely green. ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage is buried in the docs but it's caught more real problems for us than anything else.

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