Playbook

Debugging Queue Consumer Failures

How to debug missing retries, duplicate workers, and failed jobs that vanish from queues.

Pattern

Queue ownership or acknowledgement happens at the wrong time relative to async processing.

warningSymptoms

  • arrow_rightFailed jobs disappear
  • arrow_rightSame job processes twice
  • arrow_rightRetries stop after provider errors

searchWhere to look

  • arrow_rightAck/nack ordering
  • arrow_rightVisibility timeout
  • arrow_rightWorker heartbeat
  • arrow_rightAsync awaits around side effects

buildCommon fixes

  • arrow_rightAck only after durable success
  • arrow_rightNack or requeue failures
  • arrow_rightExtend visibility before expiry
  • arrow_rightRecord idempotent job completion

Practice challenges

No ready practice incident is mapped yet.