rabbitmqctl is the core tool to interact with a node. It can show the cluster status, status of the node process etc., stop and start the app and so on. It works at a lower level.
rabbitmqadmin comes with the Management plugin, and is a client for the plugin's HTTP API. You have to enable the plugin to expose that API. The Management plugin adds some overhead, I believe (it samples statistics continually to serve through the API), and as a result it's optional. Not everyone would want or need to enable it.
rabbitmqctl does the basics, whereas rabbitmqadmin is a higher-level tool.
Thanks for that. Yes, I figured that out at some point. Unfortunately, IIRC there were cases where I needed to accomplish what seemed like pretty basic things, but they could only be done with the Management plugin. This was on the order of "does this user's password hash match what I have?" The reason was to get Puppet to perform configuration management on the node. It worked eventually, but cost me an hour or two, whereas complete lack of user management (and permissions managed at the network level), is more appropriate for my use cases and works just as well.
I did not. I probably should have, but there are only so many hours in the day, and I didn't have one for this particular task. Since I still use RabbitMQ in some places I expect I will be dealing with this more, and if the situation doesn't improve I'll contact them then.
rabbitmqctl is the core tool to interact with a node. It can show the cluster status, status of the node process etc., stop and start the app and so on. It works at a lower level.
rabbitmqadmin comes with the Management plugin, and is a client for the plugin's HTTP API. You have to enable the plugin to expose that API. The Management plugin adds some overhead, I believe (it samples statistics continually to serve through the API), and as a result it's optional. Not everyone would want or need to enable it.
rabbitmqctl does the basics, whereas rabbitmqadmin is a higher-level tool.