What problems do you face with queue systems?

[Ivole32]

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I’m currently building QueueForge (https://queueforge.dev), which is a queue platform focusing on queue debugging and observability, and I’d love to learn from people who work with queue-based systems like Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, or similar ones.

If you use message queues in production, what are the biggest challenges you run into?

Is it debugging failures, understanding retries, observability, scaling consumers, or something else?

I’m especially interested in real-world problems engineers face when operating queues in production.

Also feel free to subscribe to the QueueForge newsletter: https://queueforge.dev/newsletter

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[itxashancode]

I've spent hours chasing a missing message through producer acks, broker logs, and consumer offsets. The biggest pain is when a message vanishes or duplicates without a clear trace across the pipeline.

Consumer lag is another silent killer. In Kafka, seeing group lag spike in CloudWatch or Prometheus is easy, but pinpointing why - a slow processor, a blocked thread, or a bad batch - often requires digging into custom metrics or logs you didn't set up.

Schema evolution in Kafka with Schema.

[Ivole32]

Thanks for your answer. It will be good news for you that I'm trying to solve some of the problems you mentioned with QueueForge. If you want to follow my journey, please subscribe to my newsletter at https://queueforge.dev/newsletter