Why can't you look at messages in the Rabbit Queue
If my understanding is correct, you can't actually look at messages in the rabbit queue without taking them out and putting them back in. There's no way to use rabbitmqctl to inspect a queue.
In some debugging contexts, knowing what is currently in the queue is very useful. Is there a way to get at the messages? Also, what is it about the design of Rabbit that makes this process cumbersome?
Answer
There is a "Get Messages" section for each queue in the management API. However this causes the message to be consumed and hence is a destructive action. We can re-queue this message to the queue only at the expense of sacrificing the ordering of messages [for rabbitmq versions < 2.7.0].
A more viable alternative would be to use the firehose tracer, http://www.rabbitmq.com/firehose.html [for rabbitmq versions> 2.5]. This essentially publishes the message to a different exchange (amq.rabbitmq.trace) just for debugging purposes.
Here is another GUI written on top of firehose for better visibility, http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2011/09/09/rabbitmq-tracing-a-ui-for-the-firehose/