Health Checks

Rabbit Relay exposes runtime health information through broker.health().

This is useful for service readiness endpoints, dashboards, and debugging.

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Basic usage

const health = await broker.health();

console.log(health);

Example response:

{
  peerName: "orders-service",
  connected: true,
  channelOpen: true,
  confirmChannelOpen: true,
  reconnecting: false,
  consumers: [
    {
      queue: "orders.q",
      active: true,
      prefetch: 20,
      concurrency: 5,
      activeHandlers: 2,
      pendingMessages: 8,
      onError: "retry",
      retry: {
        attempts: 3,
        then: "dead-letter",
        delayMs: 5000
      }
    }
  ]
}

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Express endpoint example

app.get("/health/rabbitmq", async (_req, res) => {
  const health = await broker.health();

  if (!health.connected || !health.channelOpen || health.reconnecting) {
    return res.status(503).json(health);
  }

  return res.json(health);
});

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Consumer state

Health output includes each registered consumer:

Field	Meaning
queue	Queue name
active	Whether consuming is active
prefetch	RabbitMQ prefetch value
concurrency	Max handler concurrency
activeHandlers	Currently running handlers
pendingMessages	Delivered messages waiting in memory
onError	Error policy
retry	Retry policy, if enabled

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Related operations APIs

Health is runtime status.

For deeper operations visibility, use:

• Lifecycle Hooks
• OpenTelemetry Adapter
• Topology Planner
• Topology Validation
• DLQ Redrive

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Best-effort status

amqplib does not expose a perfect public isOpen() API for channels and connections.

Rabbit Relay combines its own reconnect state with best-effort checks to report health.

Use this for:

• readiness checks
• debugging
• dashboards
• operational visibility

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Summary

• broker.health() returns connection and consumer state
• Useful for APIs and service readiness
• Includes concurrency, retry, delay, and pending-message info
• Health state is best-effort and operationally useful