Some SQS messages keep failing Lambda processing and disappearing after repeated retries. The team needs to capture and inspect these poison messages. What's the mechanism?
A.Increase the visibility timeout
Longer visibility doesn't stop failures — just delays them.
B.Configure a dead-letter queue (DLQ) with a max receive count — failed messages land there for inspection
Correct. Redrive policy → DLQ is designed exactly for this.
C.Delete the failing messages manually
Manual deletion loses the evidence you need to debug.
D.Switch to a FIFO queue
FIFO changes ordering/dedup, not failure capture.
Why this answer
A DLQ (set via redrive policy with maxReceiveCount) captures messages that fail processing repeatedly — preserving them for debugging instead of losing them. It's the standard poison-message isolation pattern.
Correct answer: B · Last reviewed 2026-10-28
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