A queue that reached zero in 2025, and twelve months of staying there.
2019-2024 between 40 and 8,000 messages,
continuously
2025-03 zero, for the first time
2026-03 still zero, with one excursion:
2025-09, 4 messages, a supplier returning
malformed JSON for six hours. replayed
after they fixed it.
what keeps it at zero: an owner per queue, a daily
message, and a weekly check that fails on anything
older than seven days.An empty dead letter queue is not the goal and is a signal — a queue that is never empty is one nobody reads, and one that stays at zero is one where every failure gets classified within a week. The single excursion being replayed rather than discarded is the behaviour the whole arrangement is for.