Inspecting queue state from the dashboard

Cloudflare Queues now supports sending, listing, and acknowledging messages directly from the Cloudflare dashboard. The new workflow gives developers a way to inspect queue contents and test message flow without writing a consumer worker or other debugging code.

Queues connect producer Workers, which send messages to a queue, with consumer Workers, which pull and process those messages. Until now, there was no way to look inside a queue between those two points. Debugging required building a skeleton worker just to read messages, which made it difficult to verify producer output or test consumer behavior.

The new dashboard features are available on a dedicated Messages tab on any queue's page. The three operations are straightforward:

  • Send — write and deliver a message to the queue with a click
  • List — preview queued messages without affecting their state
  • Acknowledge — remove selected messages from the queue

Sending messages without a producer

The Send message section of the Messages tab opens an editor where you can type a message and deliver it to the queue. You can switch to JSON mode for syntax-highlighted editing, or drag-and-drop a file into the textbox. The send path is the same one Workers use, so messages sent from the dashboard behave exactly like ones sent from a producer Worker.

This removes the need to modify an existing producer or scaffold a temporary one when testing consumer logic. One-off messages let you confirm that a consumer is processing as expected, and sending several in a row verifies batching settings without deploying anything.

Peeking at queued messages

The Queued messages section lets you fetch a preview batch from the queue. By default, the dashboard retrieves a batch the same size as your consumer's configured batch, giving a realistic view of what your consumer would receive on its next run. You can adjust the batch size to look at messages one at a time or in larger groups.

Each previewed message shows its body, timestamp, retry count, producer source (Worker or dashboard), and type (text or JSON). Raw bytes and JavaScript objects serialized with the structured clone algorithm are both visible in the preview.

The batch is exactly the one your consumer would fetch, and ordering is preserved. Importantly, listing messages here has no side effects:

  • Previewed messages stay in the queue
  • Retry counts are not incremented
  • Connected consumers are not disturbed

This avoids the behavior of other queue systems where reading a message advances its state. Amazon SQS increments retries on view, and RabbitMQ re-queues the message to the back of the queue. The dashboard preview approach means you can inspect a production queue safely.

You can also acknowledge messages from the same view — either individual ones or the whole batch — which removes them from the queue. That's useful for clearing malformed messages that would otherwise keep retrying, without standing up a dummy consumer.

Underlying infrastructure for HTTP pull and ack

The dashboard list and acknowledge features share a common infrastructure with an HTTP API for pulling message batches from a queue. That API, which will let you request a batch and acknowledge it to remove the messages, is planned for release soon.

The new debugging flow has already proven itself internally. During development of a web crawler example built on Queues, the ability to send test messages made it possible to iterate on a consumer worker before any producer existed. When consumer bugs surfaced, message previews revealed that malformed payloads were being sent, and acknowledgement removed the offending messages with a single action.

The new debugging tools are available to all Cloudflare Queues customers today. If you haven't enabled Queues yet, you can join the Open Beta from the Cloudflare dashboard and start testing message flows with the getting started guide.