How to make sure that my Application connection to RabbitMQ is healthy

Question

I required to setup keepalive endpoint to may web application (tomcat war). The end point will be sampled periodically by my WAF to make sure that the app is healthy.

Healthy app means that the application is up and the communication to the RabbitMQ server (version 3.5.3 /spring-rabbit 1.4.5) is up and functional.

I will open some REST API to my WAF that will verify the connection status.
Reading the documentation I am quite lost on how to implement this functionally .
I noticed some functionality that may help, but I am not sure:

1. Enable automatic recovery and use RecoveryListener and make sure that last recover did not failed.
2. Configure HeartBeat and figure out a way to be notified on “disrupted connections”
3. Create some Heath Queue and use a plugin like Shovel to echo back the message, if I do not get any response I assume the queue is down

Answer 1

You don't need anything special like shovel to implement a health check. Just create a health queue and send/receive to/from it.

If you are using Spring AMQP

rabbitTemplate.send("", "healthQueue", "foo");
String foo = rabbitTemplate.receive("healthQueue");

In addition, you can register a ConnectionListener with Spring AMQP's connection factory and you will be notified when the connection is created/closed.

Spring AMQP has had connection recovery from the beginning so the (relatively new) built-in auto recovery in the rabbitmq client is not used.

If you are not using Spring AMQP use basicPublish and basicGet on a channel to send/receive to/from a health queue.