Weekday morning Amazon SQS queue health digest in Slack
Every weekday at 8am, scan every Amazon SQS queue in your region, flag the ones backing up or filling a dead-letter queue, and post a grouped digest to Slack.
Amazon SQS
SlackOperationsEngineeringDaily DigestsNotifications & AlertsEvery weekday at 8am, run a morning Amazon SQS health digest and post it to a Slack channel the user picks at setup. The trigger is a cron schedule the user can adjust (day of week, hour, timezone).
Start by calling Amazon SQS List Queues to enumerate every queue in the configured AWS region. If a queue-name prefix is provided at setup, pass it as the filter; otherwise list everything in the region.
For each queue URL returned, call Amazon SQS Get Queue Attributes and read ApproximateNumberOfMessages (visible backlog), ApproximateNumberOfMessagesNotVisible (in-flight messages consumers are working on), ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage (how long the oldest message has been waiting), and RedrivePolicy (whether the queue targets a dead-letter queue). Use RedrivePolicy together with the queue name to tell whether the queue is itself a dead-letter queue or has one configured downstream.
Classify each queue as healthy, backing up, or DLQ-populated. A queue is DLQ-populated when it looks like a dead-letter queue (name suffix like -dlq or -deadletter, or it is referenced as the deadLetterTargetArn in another queue's RedrivePolicy) and it currently has any messages in it. A queue is backing up when its visible message count or its oldest-message age crosses a threshold the user can tune (defaults: more than 1,000 visible messages, or an oldest message older than 15 minutes). Everything else is healthy.
Rank the concerning queues first: DLQ-populated queues at the top, then backing-up queues sorted by oldest-message age descending. Group healthy queues into a single compact roll-up at the end so on-call sees the concerning items immediately.
Post one grouped digest to the chosen Slack channel using Slack Send a Message. Use clear severity emoji at the start of each line (🚨 for DLQ-populated, ⚠️ for backing up, ✅ for the healthy roll-up), and for each concerning queue show the queue name, visible message count, in-flight count, and the age of the oldest message. Underneath each hot queue add one short plain-English sentence explaining what those numbers mean so an on-call engineer can act fast — for example, ‘12,400 messages waiting and the oldest is 42 minutes old, so consumers are draining slower than producers are publishing’, or ‘423 messages sitting in the dead-letter queue, meaning downstream processing has been failing repeatedly and needs investigation before retention expires’.
If List Queues returns no queues at all, still post a single friendly note to the Slack channel saying no queues were found in the region so silence is never ambiguous.
Additional information
What does this prompt do?
- Reads every Amazon SQS queue in your region on a weekday schedule and pulls each one's current backlog, in-flight load, and age of the oldest message.
- Sorts queues by severity so the ones piling messages into a dead-letter queue or draining too slowly sit at the top of the digest.
- Posts one grouped Slack message with severity emoji, queue names, message counts, and a short plain-English note on each hot queue so on-call can act fast.
What do I need to use this?
- An AWS account with an access key that can list queues and read queue attributes in the region you want to cover.
- A Slack workspace and the channel where the morning digest should land.
How can I customize it?
- Change the time of day, weekdays, or timezone the digest runs on.
- Pick which Slack channel receives the digest, or switch to a private on-call channel if it is sensitive.
- Tune what counts as backing up by adjusting the message-count and oldest-message-age thresholds.
FAQs
Does this cover every queue automatically?
How does it handle dead-letter queues?
Can I use it across multiple AWS regions?
Will it post on weekends?
Can the digest go somewhere other than Slack?
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Stop refreshing the SQS console every morning.
Get a plain-English queue health digest waiting in Slack before your first coffee.