New Amazon CloudWatch metric for Amazon SQS monitors the age of the oldest message

Posted on: Aug 31, 2016

Today, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) has released a new Amazon CloudWatch metric that lets you monitor the age of the oldest non-deleted message in a queue.

The ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage metric is useful when applications have time-sensitive messages and developers need to ensure that messages are processed within a specific time period. Developers can use this metric to set Amazon CloudWatch alarms that issue alerts when messages remain in the queue for extended periods of time. Developers can use these alerts to take action, for example, scaling up their consumers to process messages more quickly.

To learn more about ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage and other Amazon SQS metrics, see Monitoring SQS with CloudWatch in the Amazon Simple Queue Service Developer Guide.