DeadQueue alerts you the moment a dead letter queue starts filling up, with the queue name, depth, message age, and a direct link to your runbook. No CloudWatch setup. No code.
Free tier available. No credit card required.
Most teams alarm on NumberOfMessagesSent. It won't fire when SQS automatically moves failed messages to the DLQ. We monitor ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible — the metric that actually catches failures.
Slow accumulation never triggers a spike alert. By the time you notice, the messages are gone. We alert on queue age too, so you catch the slow drain before your retention window closes.
Cron jobs, hand-rolled CloudWatch alarms, Lambda pollers — "everyone's solution is janky because there's no standard tooling." Nobody says "just use X, it's solved." Until now.
Three steps. Five minutes. Never get surprised again.
Create a read-only IAM role in your AWS account. We provide a one-click CloudFormation template — it takes about five minutes and requires only the permissions we actually need.
DeadQueue monitors the metrics that actually matter — queue depth, message age, and retention health. No agents, no code, no CloudWatch alarm configuration. We also check that your DLQ retention period outlasts your source queue so messages don't expire before you can investigate.
When a DLQ starts filling up, you hear about it right away via Slack, email, or PagerDuty. Each alert includes the queue name, current depth, oldest message age, and a direct link to your runbook. Everything you need to act, without digging through CloudWatch at 3am.
Alerts go where your team already looks. Rich context in every notification.
Catch both sudden spikes and slow drains. Two alert dimensions, one dashboard.
Redrive failed messages back to the source queue with one click. No scripts needed.
Only sqs:GetQueueAttributes and sqs:ListQueues. The IAM policy is open source and auditable.
Automatically warns if your DLQ retention is shorter than the source queue — before messages silently disappear.
Acknowledge, mute, and log root causes. See incident history per queue.
DeadQueue only requests sqs:GetQueueAttributes and sqs:ListQueues — nothing else. You create a dedicated IAM role; we never touch your actual keys. The IAM policy is open source and auditable.
Get started free. See your first DLQ alert in under five minutes.