Most of the ActiveMQ wire transports have a "trace" option, that causes detailed wire-level diagnostics to be dumped to the log. The plain STOMP support has this (as do OpenWire, etc) but the ws: transport (STOMP-over-websockets) does not. AMQP does not have a transport-specific "trace" option in ActiveMQ, but the underlying Proton library does. It seems that STOMP-over-websockets is the only supported transport that cannot be traced.