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Monitoring & Throttling in HiveMQ Cloud Starter Plan: What You Can (and Can’t) Do

Monitoring & Throttling in HiveMQ Cloud Starter Plan: What You Can (and Can’t) Do

Owned by Daria Samkova, created
May 19, 2025

Question

Can I monitor CPU, memory, or disk usage in the HiveMQ Cloud Starter plan?

Answer

🧠 Key Takeaways

Feature

Available in Starter Plan?

Feature

Available in Starter Plan?

Monitor active connections

✅ Yes

View queued messages

✅ Yes

Monitor message throughput (cluster-wide)

✅ Yes

Set up alerts (e.g., "if topic has X messages")

❌ No

Monitor CPU, memory, disk

❌ No

Grafana / Prometheus / CloudWatch support

❌ No

Remove offline clients, purge messages

✅ Yes

Observe expired messages

❌ No

Extend monitoring with plugins

❌ No (only in Dedicated)

📈 Monitoring Options in Starter Plan

  • HiveMQ Control Center

    • View active clients and client queues.

    • Observe message throughput (cluster-wide).

    • Remove persistent offline clients or purge messages manually.

  • REST API

    • Access connection info and client queues programmatically.

🛈 Per-client message throughput and expired message visibility are not available.

🚫 What’s Not Included in the Starter Plan

  • No infrastructure visibility (e.g., CPU, memory).

  • No alerting or auto-notifications.

  • No integration with third-party monitoring tools like Grafana, Prometheus, or AWS CloudWatch.

📉 What Happens If You Exceed the 1MB/s Throughput Limit?

The HiveMQ Cloud Starter plan includes throttling, but not hard cutoffs.

Example Scenarios:

  • Publishing 2000 × 1KB messages at once?
    ➤ Messages are accepted but may be processed with slight delays.

  • 2000 offline clients reconnect with 1 queued message each?
    ➤ Messages are sent at a controlled rate. Nothing is dropped unless client queues overflow (standard MQTT behavior).

🧪 Conclusion: The broker handles spikes gracefully but doesn't guarantee instant delivery in overload cases.

🧪 Test Your Own Load

To understand how your workload behaves:

  • Use the 14-day free HiveMQ Starter trial.

  • Simulate your expected load (e.g., message spikes, batch reconnects).

  • Observe how the system responds using the Control Center or API.

🧭 Need More Monitoring or Custom Alerting?

For advanced needs like:

  • Integration with external monitoring systems (Grafana, Prometheus)

  • Infrastructure metrics

  • Custom plugins or alert triggers

👉 Consider upgrading to the HiveMQ Cloud Dedicated (Enterprise) plan or running HiveMQ self-hosted.

➡ Contact us for tailored guidance.

✅ Summary

The HiveMQ Cloud Starter plan offers basic monitoring and sensible throttling, making it ideal for prototyping or low-complexity production setups. For full observability and control, consider upgrading to a dedicated deployment.