CloudWatch Metric Guide
Amazon SQS CloudWatch AlarmsThresholds, failures, and debugging guides
3 CloudWatch metrics covered for Amazon SQS. Each guide includes the recommended alarm threshold, common root causes, and how Nuberio automatically diagnoses it when it fires.
3
metrics covered
AWS/SQS
namespace
5 min
to run a free audit
Amazon SQS metrics
ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage
ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage reports how many seconds have passed since the oldest non-deleted message in the queue was sent. It measures processing lag directly, independent of how many messages are queued.
Threshold
≥ 50% of MessageRetentionPeriod (early warning), ≥ 80% of MessageRetentionPeriod (critical)
ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible
ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible reports the number of messages currently available to be received from the queue — the standard "queue depth" metric most SQS dashboards lead with.
Threshold
Sustained upward trend over 15+ minutes, evaluated with metric math against a rolling baseline rather than a fixed count
ApproximateNumberOfMessagesNotVisible
ApproximateNumberOfMessagesNotVisible reports the number of messages currently in flight — received by a consumer and hidden from other consumers for the duration of the visibility timeout, but not yet deleted.
Threshold
Flat and elevated for longer than your configured VisibilityTimeout, rather than a fixed count
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Looking for alarms across other AWS services? View the full CloudWatch metric guide — thresholds and debugging guides for RDS, Lambda, ECS, ALB, EC2, and DynamoDB.