Stop Trusting CloudWatch to Monitor Your Dead Letter Queues
March 29, 2026 · DeadQueue Team
Depth thresholds catch spikes, not slow drains. Auto-redrives are invisible to default metrics. Here are 5 SQS alerting gaps and what to watch instead.
Blog
SQS Dead Letter Queue Alert: The First 5 Checks to Run
March 26, 2026 · DeadQueue Team
Cut your DLQ incident time from 45 minutes to 5. This runbook gives on-call engineers a repeatable sequence for diagnosing code bugs, infra failures, and throttle storms.
Lambda Retry Storms: Why One Bad Message Fills Your DLQ
March 25, 2026 · DeadQueue Team
Lambda's default retry config turns a single bad message into hundreds of DLQ entries. Here's how to detect it, stop it, and never get paged for it again.
DLQ Incident Response Blind Spots: Why On-Call Engineers Miss Silent Failures
March 24, 2026 · DeadQueue Team
Silent DLQ failures kill MTTR. Here's why on-call misses them and how to build the alert that catches everything.
Your Messages Are Expiring While CloudWatch Shows Green
March 21, 2026 · DeadQueue Team
Queue depth alarms miss slow drains and message age entirely. Here are the SQS monitoring blind spots that don't show up until it's too late.
The DLQ Graveyard: Why Dead Letter Queues Fill Up and Nobody Notices
March 18, 2026 · DeadQueue Team
DLQs fill up and sit ignored for weeks because nobody owns them. Here's the ownership and monitoring pattern that actually keeps the graveyard empty.
SQS Age-Based Alerting: Catch Slow Drains Before Messages Expire
March 12, 2026 · DeadQueue Team
Queue depth won't warn you when messages are about to expire. Learn how ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage catches slow SQS drains before data is lost.
SQS DLQ Expiration: The Hidden Mechanic Deleting Your Messages
March 11, 2026 · DeadQueue Team
Most engineers set a 14-day DLQ retention period and assume they're safe. They're not. Here's the AWS expiration mechanic that causes silent, irreversible message loss.
Your DLQ Is Set to 14 Days. Your Messages Are Still Expiring.
March 10, 2026 · DeadQueue Team
SQS preserves the original enqueue timestamp when a message moves to the DLQ. A message that spent 3 days on the source queue arrives in the DLQ with 3 days already burned off its clock.
How to Audit Your SQS DLQ Alert Configuration in 10 Minutes
March 3, 2026 · DeadQueue Team
Most DLQ alert configs have at least one silent gap. Here's how to find them without reading the CloudWatch docs.