Visualize AWS SQS Queue Topology
Visualize an AWS SQS queue's SNS associations, dead-letter sources, and redrive target.
Queue Tools ▸ View Topology draws a read-only diagram of what Tarmac can see around the selected queue:
- SNS topic associations. Topics that publish to this queue, or to one of its dead-letter sources, drawn with "publishes via SNS subscription" edges.
- The queue itself. The center node, with its type (Standard or FIFO) and a warning chip when the queue is a dead-letter target. Depth, visibility timeout, retention, and other attributes live in Queue Tools ▸ Queue Settings, not on the diagram.
- Dead-letter sources. The queues that dead-letter into this one.
- Redrive target. The DLQ this queue dead-letters to, with a Max receives N chip showing the receive-count threshold from the redrive policy.
The detail strip copies the queue ARN and URL in one click, and the title bar links straight to the queue in the AWS Console.
What the diagram cannot show
Lambda triggers and direct SDK producers do not appear. Event-source mappings live in Lambda's control plane, and a plain SendMessage caller leaves no trace on the queue. An empty producer lane does not mean nothing writes to this queue.
Tarmac needs sqs:GetQueueAttributes on the selected queue and on each source it discovers. Dead-letter source discovery also needs sqs:ListDeadLetterSourceQueues. Without it, the source lanes are left out.
If some lookups fail, Tarmac shows the relationships it could resolve and warns you that the picture is partial.
Check topology before a DLQ session
Two chips summarize useful context. Max receives is the receive-count threshold in the redrive policy, and DLQ target means Tarmac found source queues that dead-letter here. Review them before redrive or staged-delete work.